Mark Twain

MARK TWAIN

MARK TWAIN

BY

ARCHIBALD HENDERSON

WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY

ALVIN LANGDON GOBURN

NEW YORK

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

PRINTED BY

TURNBULL AND SPEARS,
EDINBURGH

TO

G. ALPHONSO SMITH

SCHOLAR, GOOD FELLOW. FRIEND

52521)0

Haply — who knows ? — somewhere

In Avalon, Isle of Dreams,

In vast contentment at last,

With every grief done away,

While Chaucer and Shakespeare wait,

And Moliere hangs on his words,

And Cervantes not far off

Listens and smiles apart,

With that incomparable drawl

He is jesting with Dagonet now."

BLISS CARMAN.

PREFACE

THERE are to-day, all over the world, men and
women and children who owe a debt of almost
personal gratitude to Mark Twain for the joy of his
humour and the charm of his personality. In the
future they will, I doubt not, seek and welcome
opportunities to acknowledge that debt. My own
experience with the works of Mark Twain is in no
sense exceptional. From the days of early childhood,
my feeling for Mark Twain, derived first solely from
acquaintance with his works, was a feeling of warm
and, as it were, personal affection. With limitless
interest and curiosity, I used to hear the Uncle
Remus stories from the lips of one of our old family
servants, a negro to whom I was devotedly attached.
These stories were narrated to me in the negro
dialect with such perfect naturalness and racial
gusto that I often secretly wondered if the narrator

ix

x MARK TWAIN

were not Uncle Remus himself in disguise. I was
thus cunningly prepared, " coached " shall I say,
for the maturer charms of Tom Sawyer and Huckle
berry Finn. With Uncle Remus and Mark Twain
as my preceptors, I spent the days of my youth
— excitedly alternating, spell-bound, between the
inexhaustible attractions of Tom, Huck, Jim, Indian
Joe, the Duke and the Dauphin, and their compeers
on the one hand ; and Brer Rabbit, Sis Cow, and a
thousand other fantastic, but very real creatures
of the animal kingdom on the other.

I felt a strange sort of camaraderie, of personal
attachment, for Mark Twain during all the years
before I came into personal contact with him. It
was the dictum of a distinguished English critic, to
the effect that Huckleberry Finn was a literary
masterpiece, which first awoke in me, then a mere
boy, a genuine respect for literary criticism ; for
here was expressed an opinion which / had long
secretly cherished, but somehow never dared to
utter !

My personal association with Mr. Clemens, com
paratively brief though it was — an ocean voyage,

PREFACE xi

meetings here and there, a brief stay as a guest in
his home — gave me at last the justification for
paying the debt which, with the years, had grown
greater and more insistently obligatory. I felt
both relief and pleasure when he authorized me
to pay that debt by writing an interpretation of
his life and work.

It is an appreciation originating in the heart of
one who loved Mark Twain's works for a generation
before he ever met Samuel L. Clemens. It is an
interpretation springing from the conviction that
Mark Twain was a great American who compre
hensively incorporated and realized his own country
and his own age as no American has so completely
done before him ; a supreme humorist who ever
wore the panache of youth, gaiety, and bonhomie ;
a brilliant wit who never dipped his darts in the
poison of cynicism, misanthropy, or despair ; con
stitutionally a reformer who, heedless of self, boldly
struck for the right as he saw it ; a philosopher
and sociologist who intuitively understood the secret
springs of human motive and impulse, and em
pirically demonstrated that intuition in works

xii MARK TWAIN

which crossed frontiers, survived translation, and
went straight to the human, beneath the disguise
of the racial ; a genius who lived to know and enjoy
the happy rewards of his own fame ; a great man
who saw life steadily and saw it whole.

ARCHIBALD HENDERSON.

LONDON,
August 5, 1910.

NOTE. — The author esteems himself in the highest degree
fortunate in having the co-operation of Mr. Alvin Langdon
Coburn. All the illustrations, both autochrome and mono
chrome, are the work of Mr. Coburn.

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE ..... ix

I. INTRODUCTORY .... 1

II. THE MAN . . . .13

III. THE HUMORIST . . . .67

IV. THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS . . 127
V. PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST . 177

APPENDIX : BIBLIOGRAPHY 213

xiii

I. INTRODUCTORY

" I've a theory that every author, while living, has a pro
jection of himself, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near
and distant places, and makes friends and enemies for him out
of folk who never knew him in the flesh. When the author
dies, this phantom fades away, not caring to continue business
at the old stand. Then the dead writer lives only in the
impression made by his literature ; this impression may grow
sharper or fainter according to the fashions and new conditions
of the time."

Letter oj THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH to WILLIAM
DEAN HOWELLS of date December 23, 1901.

INTRODUCTORY

IN the past, the attitude of the average American
toward Mark Twain has been most characteristically
expressed in a sort of complacent and chuckling
satisfaction. There was pride in the thought that
America, the colossal, had produced a superman
of humour. The national vanity was touched when
the nations of the world rocked and roared with
laughter over the comically primitive barbarisms of
the funny man from the " Wild and Woolly West."
Mark Twain was lightly accepted as an international
comedian magically evoking the laughter of a world.
It would be a mis-statement to affirm that the
works of Mark Twain were reckoned as falling
within the charmed circle of " Literature." They
were not reckoned in connexion with literature
at all.

The fingers of one hand number those who real
ized in Mark Twain one of the supreme geniuses of
our age. Even in the event of his death, when
the flood-gates of critical chatter have been thrown

4 MARK TWAIN

emptily wide, there is room for grave doubt whether
a realization of the unique and incomparable
position of Mark Twain in the republic of letters
has fully dawned upon the American consciousness.
The literatures of England and Europe do not posit
an aesthetic, embracing work of such primitive
crudity and apparently unstudied frankness as
the work of Mark Twain. It is for American
criticism to posit this more comprehensive aesthetic,
and to demonstrate that the work of Mark Twain
is the work of a great artist. It would be absurd
to maintain that Mark Twain's appeal to posterity
depends upon the dicta of literary criticism. It
would be absurd to deny that upon America
rests the task of demonstrating, to a world willing
enough to be convinced, that Mark Twain is one
of the supreme and imperishable glories of American
literature.

At any given moment in history, the number of
living writers to whom can be attributed what a
Frenchman would call mondial eclat is surprisingly
few. It was not so many years ago that Rudyard
Kipling, with vigorous, imperialistic note, won for
himself the unquestioned title of militant spokesman
for the Anglo-Saxon race. That fame has suffered
eclipse in the passage of time. To-day, Bernard

INTRODUCTORY 5

Shaw has a fame more world-wide than that of any
other literary figure in the British Isles. His dramas
are played from Madrid to Helsingfors, from Buda-
Pesth to Stockholm, from Vienna to St Petersburg,
from Berlin to Buenos Ayres. Recently Zola,
Ibsen, and Tolstoy constituted the literary hierarchy
of the world — according to popular verdict. Since
Zola and Ibsen have passed from the scene, Tolstoy
exerts unchallenged the profoundest influence upon
the thought and consciousness of the world. This
is an influence streaming less from his works than
from his life, less from his intellect than from his
conscience. The literati bemoan the artist of an
epoch prior to What is Art*? The whole world pays
tribute to the passionate integrity of Tolstoy's
moral aspiration.*

Until yesterday, Mark Twain vied with Tolstoy for
the place of most widely read and most genuinely
popular author in the world. In a sense not easily
misunderstood, Mark Twain has a place in the
minds and hearts of the great mass of humanity
throughout the civilized world, which, if measured
in terms of affection, sympathy, and spontaneous
enjoyment, is without a parallel. The robust

* While this book was going through the press, news has come of
the death of Tolstoy.

6 MARK TWAIN

nationalism of Kipling challenges the defiant opposi
tion of foreigners ; whilst his reportorial realism
offends many an inviolable canon of European
taste. With all his incandescent wit and comic
irony, Bernard Shaw makes his most vivid impression
upon the upper strata of society ; his legendary
character, moreover, is perpetually standing in the
light of the serious reformer. Tolstoy's works are
Russia's greatest literary contribution to posterity ;
and yet his literary fame has suffered through his
extravagant ideals, the magnificent futility of his
inconsistency, and the almost maniacal mysticism
of his unrealizable hopes.

If Mark Twain makes a more deeply, more
comprehensively popular appeal, it is doubtless
because he makes use of the universal solvent
of humoufc. That eidolon of which Aldrich speaks
— a compact of good humour, robust sanity, and
r^ large-minded humanity — has diligently " gone about

in near and distant places," everywhere making
? *5 /9*/ warm and lifelong friends of folk of all nation
alities who have never known Mark Twain in
the flesh. The French have a way of speaking
of an author's public as if it were a select and
limited segment of the conglomerate of readers ;
and in a country like France, with its innumerable

INTRODUCTORY 7

literary cliques and sects, there is some reason for
the phraseology. In reality, the author appeals to
many different " publics " or classes of readers —
in proportion to the many-sidedness of the reader's
human interests and the catholicity of his tastes.
Mark Twain first opens the eyes of many a boy to
the power of the great human book, warm with the
actuality of experience and the life-blood of the heart.
By humorous inversion, he points the sound moral
and vivifies the right principle for the youth to
whom the dawning consciousness of morality is the
first real psychological discovery of life. With hearty
laughter at the stupid irritations of self-conscious
virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid Puritanism
of mechanical morality, Mark Twain enraptures
that innumerable company of the sophisticated
who have chafed under the omnipresent influence
of a " good example " and stilled the painless
pangs of an unruly conscience. With splendid
satire for the base, with shrill condemnation for
tyranny and oppression, with the scorpion-lash for
the equivocal, the fraudulent, and the insincere,
Mark Twain inspires the growing body of reformers
in all countries who would remedy the ills of demo
cratic government with the knife of publicity. The
wisdom of human experience and of sagacious

8 MARK TWAIN

tolerance informing his books for the young, provokes
the question whether these books are not more
apposite to the tastes of experienced age than to the
fancies of callow youth. The navvy may rejoice in
Life on the Mississippi. Youth and age may share
without jealousy the abounding fun and primitive
naturalness of Huckleberry Finn. True lovers of
adventure may revel in the masterly narrative of
Tom Sawyer. The artist may bestow his critical
meed of approval upon the beauty of Joan of Arc.
The moralist may heartily validate the ethical
lesson of The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg. Any
one may pay the tribute of irresistible explosions of
laughter to the horse-play of Roughing It, the colossal
extravagance of The Innocents Abroad, the irreverence
and iconoclasm of that Yankee intruder into the
hallowed confines of Camelot. All may rejoice in
the spontaneity and refreshment of truth ; spiritu
ally co-operate in forthright condemnation of fraud,
peculation, and sham ; and breathe gladly the fresh
and bracing air of sincerity, sanity, and wisdom.
The stevedore on the dock, the motor-man on the
street car, the newsboy on the street, the river-
man on the Mississippi — all speak with exuberant
affection in memory of that quaint figure in his
white suit, his ruddy face shining through wreaths of

INTRODUCTORY 9

tobacco smoke and surmounted by a great halo of
silvery hair. In one day, as Mark Twain was fond
of relating, an emperor and a portier vied with
each other in tributes of admiration and esteem
for this man and his works. It is Mark Twain's
imperishable glory, not simply that his name is the
most familiar of that of any author who has lived in
our own times, but that it is remembered with infinite
and irrepressible zest.

" We think of Mark Twain not as other celebrities,
but as the man whom we knew and loved," said
Dr._Vaii^Djke in his Memorial Address. " We re
member the realities which made his life worth
while, the strong and natural manhood that was in
him, the depth and tenderness of his affections, his
laughing enmity to all shams and pretences, his long
and faithful witness to honesty and fair-dealing.

" Those who know the story of Mark Twain's
career know how bravely he faced hardships and
misfortune, how loyally he toiled for years to meet
a debt of conscience, following the injunction of the
New Testament, to provide not only things honest,
but things ' honourable in the sight of all men.'

'' Those who know the story of his friendships
and his family life know that he was one who loved
much and faithfully, even unto the end. Those

10 MARK TWAIN

who know his work as a whole know that under
the lambent and irrepressible humour which was
his gift, there was a foundation of serious thoughts
and noble affections and desires.

" Nothing could be more false than to suppose
that the presence of humour means the absence
of depth and earnestness. There are elements of
the unreal, the absurd, the ridiculous in this strange,
incongruous world which must seem humorous
even to the highest mind. Of these the Bible
says : ' He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh ;
the Almighty shall hold them in derision.' But
the mark of this higher humour is that it_doesjiot

} laugh at the weak, the helpless, the true, the innocent ;

; only at the false, the pretentious, the vain, the

| hypocritical.

" Mark Twain himself would be the first to smile
at the claim that his humour was infallible ; but
we say without doubt that he used his gift, not
for evil, but for good. The atmosphere of his work
is clean and wholesome. He made fun without
hatred. He laughed many of the world's false
claimants out of court, and entangled many of the
world's false witnesses in the net of ridicule. In
his best books and stories, coloured with his own
experiences, he touched the absurdities of life with

INTRODUCTORY 11

penetrating, but not unkindly, mockery, and made
us feel somehow the infinite pathos of life's realities.
No one can say that he ever failed to reverence the
purity, the frank, joyful, genuine nature of the
little children, of whom Christ said, ' Of such is the
kingdom of heaven.'

" Now he is gone, and our thoughts of him are
tender, grateful, proud. We are glad of his friend
ship ; glad that he expressed so richly one of the
great elements in the temperament of America ;
glad that he has left such an honourable record as
a man of letters ; and glad also for his own sake
that after many and deep sorrows he is at peace
and, we trust, happy in the fuller light.

" ' Rest after toil, port after stormy seas,
Death after life doth greatly please.' "

II. THE MAN

" ( We cannot live always on the cold heights of the sublime
— the thin air stifles ' — I have forgotten who said it. We
cannot flush always with the high ardour of the signers of
the Declaration, nor remain at the level of the address at
Getty sburg, nor cry continually, * O Beautiful ! My country ! '
Yet, in the long dull interspans between these sacred moments
we need some one to remind us that we are a nation. For
in the dead vast and middle of the years insidious foes are
lurking — anaemic refinements, cosmopolitan decadencies, the
egotistic and usurping pride of great cities, the cold sickening
of the heart at the reiterated exposures of giant fraud and
corruption. When our countrymen migrate because we have
no kings or castles, we are thankful to any one who will tell
us what we can count on. When they complain that our
soil lacks the humanity essential to great literature, we are
grateful even for the firing of a national joke heard round the
world. And when Mark Twain, robust, big-hearted, gifted
with the divine power to use words, makes us all laugh together,
builds true romances with prairie fire and Western clay, and
shows us that we are at one on all the main points, we feel that
he has been appointed by Providence to see to it that the
precious ordinary self of the Republic shall suffer no harm."
STUART P. SHERMAN : " MARK TWAIN."
The Nation, May 12, 1910.

THE MAN

AMERICAN literature, indeed I might say American
life, can exhibit no example of supreme success from
the humblest beginnings, so signal as the example
of Mark Twain. Lincoln became President of the
United States, as did Grant and Johnson. But
assassination began for Lincoln an apotheosis which
has gone to deplorable lengths of hero-worship and
adulation. Grant was one of the great failures in
American public life ; and Johnson, brilliant but
unstable, narrowly escaped impeachment. Mark
Twain enjoys the unique distinction of exhibiting
a progressive development, a deepening and broaden-
ing__of forces, a ripening of intellectual and spiritual
powers from the beginning to the end of his career.
From the standpoint of the man of letters, the
evolution of Mark Twain from a journeyman printer
to a great author, from a merry- andrew to a world-
humorist, from a river-pilot to a trustworthy navi
gator on the vast and uncharted seas of human
experience, may be taken as symbolic of the romance <
of American life.

15

16 MARK TWAIN

With a sort of mock-pride, Clemens referred at
times to the ancestral glories of his house — the judge
who condemned Charles L, and all those other
notables, of Dutch and English breeds, who shed
lustre upon the name of Clemens. Yet he claimed
that he had not examined into these traditions,
chiefly because " I was so busy polishing up this
end of the line and trying to make it showy." His
mother, a " Lambton with a p," of Kentucky,
married John Marshall Clemens, of Virginia, a
man of determination and force, in Lexington, in
1823 ; but neither was endowed with means, and
their life was of the simplest. From Jamestown,
in the mountain solitudes of East Tennessee,
they removed in 1829, much as Judge Hawkins is
said to have done in The Gilded Age, settling at
Florida, Missouri. Here was born, on November 30,
1835, a few months after their arrival, Samuel
Langhorne Clemens. Long afterwards he stated that
he had increased by one per cent, the population
of this village of one hundred inhabitants, thereby
doing more than the best man in history had ever
done for any other town.

Although weak and sickly, the child did not
suffer from the hard life, and survived two other
children, Margaret and Benjamin. At different times

THE MAN 17

his life was in danger, the local doctor always coming
to the rescue. He once asked his mother, after she
had reached old age, if she hadn't been uneasy about
him. She admitted she had been uneasy about him
the whole time. But when he inquired further if
she was afraid he would not live, she answered after
a reflective pause — as if thinking out the facts —
that she had been afraid he would !

His sister Pamela afterwards became the mother
of Samuel E. Moffett, the writer; and his brother
Orion, ten years his senior, afterwards was intimately
associated with him in life and found a place in his
writings.

In 1839, John Marshall Clemens tired of the un
promising life of Florida and removed to Hannibal,
Missouri. He was a stern, unbending man, a lawyer
by profession, a merchant by vocation ; after
his removal to Hannibal he became a Justice of
the Peace, an office he filled with all the dignity
of a local autocrat. His forum was a " dingy "
office, furnished with " a dry -goods box, three or four
rude stools, and a puncheon bench." The solemnity
of his manner in administering the law won for him,
among his neighbours, the title of Judge.

One need but recall the scenes in which Tom
Sawyer was born and bred to realize in its actuality

18 MARK TWAIN

the model from which these scenes were drawn.
" Sam was always a good-hearted boy," his mother
once remarked, " but he was a very wild and mis
chievous one, and, do what we would, we could
never make him go to school. This used to trouble
his father and me dreadfully, and we were convinced
that he would never amount to as much in the world
as his brothers, because he was not near so steady
and sober-minded as they were." At school, he
" excelled only in spelling " ; outside of school he
was the prototype of his own Huckleberry Finn,
mischievous and prankish, playing truant when
ever the opportunity afforded. " Often his father
would start him off to school," his mother once
said, " and in a little while would follow him to
ascertain his whereabouts. There was a large stump
on the way to the schoolhouse, and Sam would
take his position behind that, and as his father
went past would gradually circle around it in such
a way as to keep out of sight. Finally, his father
and the teacher both said it was of no use to try to
teach Sam anything, because he was determined
not to learn. But I never gave up. He was always
a great boy for history, and could never get tired
of that kind of reading ; but he hadn't any use for
schoolhouses and text books."

THE MAN 19

Mr. Howells has aptly described Hannibal as a
" loafing, out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slave-
holding Mississippi river town." Young Clemens
accepted the institution of slavery as a matter of
course, for his father was a slave-owner; and his
mother's wedding dowry consisted in part of two
or three slaves. Judge Clemens was a very austere
man ; like so many other slave-holders, he silently
abhorred slavery. To his children, especially to
Sam, as well as to his slaves, he was, however, a
stern taskmaster. Mark Twain has described the
terms on which he and his father lived as a sort of
armed neutrality. If at times this neutrality was
broken and suffering ensued, the breaking and the
suffering were always divided up with strict im
partiality between them — his father doing the break
ing and he the suffering ! Sam claimed to be a
very backward, cautious, unadventurous boy. But
this modest estimate is subject to modification
when we learn that once he jumped off a two-
story stable ; another time he gave an elephant
a plug of tobacco, and retired without waiting for
an answer ; and still another time he pretended
to be talking in his sleep, and got off a portion
of every original conundrum in hearing of his
father. He begs the curious not to pry into the

20 MARK TWAIN

result — as it was of no consequence to any one but
himself !

The cave, so graphically described in Tom Sawyer,
was one of Sam's favourite haunts ; and his first
sweetheart was Laura Hawkins, the Becky Thatcher
of Tom's admiration. " Sam was always up to some
mischief," this lady once remarked in later life,
when in reminiscential mood. " We attended
Sunday-school together, and they had a system of
rewards for saying verses after committing them to
memory. A blue ticket was given for ten verses,
a red ticket for ten blue, a yellow for ten red, and a
Bible for ten yellow tickets. If you will count up,
you will see it makes a Bible for ten thousand verses.
Sam came up one day with his ten yellow tickets,
and everybody knew he had not said a verse, but
had just got them by trading with the boys. But
he received his Bible with all the serious air of a
diligent student ! "

Mark Twain, save when in humorous vein, has
never pretended that his success was due to any
marvellous qualities of mind, any indefatigable
industry, any innate energy and perseverance.
I have good reason to recall his favourite theory,
which he was fond of expounding, to the effect that
circumstance is man's master. He likened circum-

THE MAN 21

stance to the attraction of gravity ; and declared that
while it is man's privilege to argue with circum
stance, as it is the honourable privilege of the falling
body to argue with the attraction of gravity, it does
no good : man has to obey. Circumstance has as
its working partner man's temperament, his natural
disposition. Temperament is not the creation of
man, but an innate quality ; over it he has no
authority ; for its acts he cannot be held responsible.
It cannot be permanently changed or even modified.
No power can keep it modified. For it is inherent
and enduring, as unchanging as the lines upon the
thumb or the conformation of the skull. Throughout
his life, circumstance seemed like a watchful spirit,
switching his temperament into those channe. 3 of
experience and development leading unerringly to
the career of the author.

The death of Judge Clemens was the first link in
the long chain of circumstance — for his son was
at once taken from school and apprenticed to the
editor and proprietor of the Hannibal Courier.
He was allowed the usual emolument of the office
of apprentice, " board and clothes, but no money " ;
and even at that, though the board was paid, the
clothes rarely materialized. Several weeks later his
brother Orion returned to Hannibal, and in 1850

22 MARK TWAIN

brought out a little paper called the Hannibal
Journal. He took Sam out of the Courier office
and engaged him for the Journal at $3.50 a week —
though he was never able to pay a cent of the wages.
One of Mark's fellow-townsmen once confessed :
" Yes, I knew him when he was a boy. He was a
printer's devil — I think that's what they called
him — and they didn't miss it." At a banquet some
years ago, Mark Twain aptly described at length
his experiences as a printer's apprentice. There
were a thousand and one menial services he was called
upon to perform. If the subscribers paid at all, it
was only sometimes — and then the town subscribers
paid in groceries, the country subscribers in cabbages
and cordwood. If they paid, they were puffed in
the paper ; and if the editor forgot to insert the
puff, the subscriber stopped the paper ! Every
subscriber regarded himself as assistant editor,
ex officio ; gave orders as to how the paper was to
be edited, supplied it with opinions, and directed its
policy. Of course, every time the editor failed to
follow his suggestions, he revenged himself by stopping
the paper !

After some financial stress, the paper was moved
into the Clemens home, a " two - story brick " ;
and here for several years it managed to worry along,

THE MAN 23

spasmodically hovering between life and death.
Life was easy with the editors of that paper ; for
if they pied a form, they suspended until the next
week. They always suspended anyhow, every now
and then, when the fishing was good ; and always
fell back upon the illness of the editor as a convenient
excuse. Mark admitted that this was a paltry
excuse, for the all- sufficing reason that a paper
of that sort was just as well off with a sick editor
as a well one, and better off with a dead one than with
either of them. At the age of fifteen he considered
himself a skilled journeyman printer ; and his faculty
for comedic portrayal had already betrayed itself in
occasional clumsy efforts. In My First Literary
Venture, he narrates his experiences, amongst others
how greatly he increased the circulation of the
paper, and incensed the " inveterate woman-killer,''
whose poetry for that week's paper read, " To Mary

in H 1 " (Hannibal). Mark added a " snappy

foot-note " at the bottom, in which he agreed to let
the thing pass, for just that once ; but distinctly
warning Mr. J. Gordon Runnels that the paper had a
character to sustain, and that in future, when Mr.
Runnels wanted to commune with his friends in
h — 1, he must select some other medium for that
communication ! Many were the humorous skits,

24 MARK TWAIN

crudely illustrated with cuts made from wooden
blocks hacked out with his jack-knife, which the
mischievous young " devil " inserted in his brother's
paper. Here we may discern the first spontaneous
outer oppings of the genuine humorist. " It was on
this paper, the Hannibal Journal," says his biog
rapher, Mr. Albert B. Paine, " that young Sam
Clemens began his writings — burlesques, as a rule,
of local characters and conditions — usually published
in his brother's absence, generally resulting in trouble
on his return. Yet they made the paper sell, and if
Orion had but realized his possession he might have
turned his brother's talent into capital even then."

One evening in 1853, the boy, consumed with
wanderlust, asked his mother for five dollars — to
start on his travels. He failed to receive the money,
but he defiantly announced that he would go " any
how." He had managed to save a tiny sum, and
that night he disappeared and fled to St Louis.
There he worked in the composing-room of the
Evening News for a time, and then started out " to
see the world " — New York, where a little World's
Fair was in progress. He was somewhat better off
than was Benjamin Franklin when he entered
Philadelphia — for he had two or three dollars in
pocket- change, and a ten-dollar bank-bill concealed

THE MAN 25

in the lining of his coat. For a time he sweltered
in a villainous mechanics' boarding-house in Duane
Street, and worked at starvation wages in the
printing-office of Gray & Green. Being recognized
one day by a man from Hannibal, he fled to Phila
delphia where he worked for some months as a
" sub " on the Inquirer and the Public Ledger. Next
came a flying trip to Washington "to see the sights
there," and then back he went to the Mississippi
Valley. This journey to the " vague and fabled
East " really opened his eyes to the great possi
bilities that the world has in store for the traveller.
Meantime, Orion had gone to Muscatine, Ohio,
and acquired a small interest there ; and, after his
marriage, he and his wife went to Keokuk and started
a little job printing-office. Here Sam worked with
his brother until the winter of 1856-7, when circum
stance once again played the part of good fairy.
As he was walking along the street one snowy
evening, his attention was attracted by a piece of
paper which the wind had blown against the wall.
It proved to be a fifty-dollar bill ; and after advertis
ing for the owner for four days, he stealthily moved
to Cincinnati in order " to take that money out of
danger." Now comes the second crucial event in
his life !

26 MARK TWAIN

For long the ambition for river life had remained
with him — and now there seemed some possibility
of realizing these ambitions. He first wanted to be
a cabin boy ; then his ideal was to be a deck hand,
because of his splendid conspicuousness as he stood
on the end of the stage plank with a coil of rope in
his hand. But these were only day-dreams — he
didn't admit, even to himself, that they were any
thing more than heavenly impossibilities. But as he
worked during the winter in the printing-office of
Wrightson & Company of Cincinnati, he whiled
away his leisure hours reading Lieutenant Herndon's
account of his explorations of the Amazon, and
became greatly interested in his description of the
cocoa industry. Now he set to work to map out
a new and thrilling career. The expedition sent out
by the government to explore the Amazon had
encountered difficulties and left unfinished the ex
ploration of the country about the head-waters,
thousands of miles from the mouth of the river.
It mattered not to him that New Orleans was fifteen
hundred miles away from Cincinnati, and that he
had only thirty dollars left. His mind was made up :
he would go on and complete the work of exploration.
So in April, 1857, he set sail for New Orleans on an
ancient tub, called the Paul Jones. For the paltry

THE MAN 27

sum of sixteen dollars, he was enabled to revel in
the unimagined glories of the main saloon. At
last he was under way — realizing his boyhood
dream, unable to contain himself for joy. At last
he saw himself as that hero of his boyish fancy —
a traveller.

When he reached New Orleans, after the pro
longed ecstasy of two weeks on a tiny Mississippi
steamer, he discovered that no ship was leaving
for Para, that there never had been one leaving for
Para, and that there probably would not be one
leaving for Para that century. A policeman made
him move on, threatening to run him in if he ever
caught him reflecting in the public street again.
Just as his money failed him, his old friend circum
stance arrived, with another turning-point in his
life — a new link. On his way down the river he had
met Horace Bixby; he turned to him in this hour
of need. It has been charged against Mark Twain
that he was deplorably lazy — apocryphal anecdotes
are still narrated with much gusto to prove it. Think
of a lazy boy undertaking the stupendous task of
learning to know the intricate and treacherous secrets
of the great river, to know every foot of the route
in the dark as well as he knew his own face in the
glass ! And yet he confesses that he was unaware

28 MARK TWAIN

of the immensity of the undertaking upon which
he had embarked.

"In 1852," says gixb^, "I was chief pilot on
the Paul Jones, a boat that made occasional trips
from Pittsburg to New Orleans. One day a tall,
angular, hoosier-like young fellow, whose limbs
appeared to be fastened with leather hinges, entered
the pilot-house, and in a peculiar, drawling voice,
said —

" < Good mawnin, sir. Don't you want to take
er piert young fellow and teach 'im how to be er
pilot ? '

6 No sir ; there is more bother about it than
it's worth.'

" 6 1 wish you would, mister. I'm er printer by
trade, but it don't 'pear to 'gree with me, and I'm
on my way to Central America for my health. I
believe I'll make a tolerable good pilot, 'cause I
like the river.'

" ' What makes you pull your words that way ? '

" ' I don't know, mister ; you'll have to ask my
Ma. She pulls hern too. Ain't there some way
that we can fix it, so that you'll teach me how to be
- er pilot?'

" ' The only way is for money.'

" ' How much are you going to charge ?

THE MAN 29

" ' Well, I'll teach you the river for $500.'

" c Gee whillikens ! he ! he ! I ain't got $500,
but I've got five lots in Keokuk, Iowa, and 2000
acres of land in Tennessee that is worth two bits
an acre any time. You can have that if you
want it.'

" 1 told him I did not care for his land, and after
a while he agreed to pay $100 in cash (borrowed
from his brother-in-law, William A. Moffett, of
Virginia), $150 in twelve months, and the balance
when he became a pilot. He was with me for a
long time, but sometimes took occasional trips
with other pilots." And he significantly adds :
" He was always drawling out dry jokes, but then
we did not pay any attention to him."

It cannot be thought accidental that Sam Clemens
became a pilot. Bixby became his mentor, the
pilot-house his recitation-room, the steamboat his
university, the great river the field of knowledge.
In that stupendous course in nature's own college,
he " learned the river " as schoolboy seldom
masters his Greek or his mathematics. With the
naive assurance of youth, he gaily enters upon the
task of " learning " some twelve or thirteen hundred
miles of the great Mississippi. Long afterwards,
he confessed that had he really known what he was

30 MARK TWAIN

about to require of his faculties, he would never
have had the courage to begin.

His comic sketches, published in the Hannibal
Weekly Courier in his brother's absence, furnish
the first link, his apprenticeship to Bixby the
second link in the chain of circumstance. For two
years and a half he sailed the river as a master pilot ;
his trustworthiness secured for him the command
of some of the best boats on the river, and he was
so skilful that he never met disaster on any of his
trips. He narrowly escaped it in 1861, for when
Louisiana seceded, his boat was drafted into the
Confederate service. As he reached St. Louis, having
taken passage for home, a shell came whizzing by
and carried off part of the pilot-house. It was the
end of an era : the Civil War had begun. The
occupation of the pilot was gone ; but the river had
given up to him all of its secrets. He was to show
them to a world, in Life on the Mississippi and
Huckleberry Finn.

The story of the derivation of the famous nom
de guerre has often been narrated — and as often
erroneously. As the steamboat approaches a
sandbank, snag, or other obstruction, the man at
the bow heaves the lead and sings out. " By the
mark, three," " Mark twain," etc. — meaning three

THE MAN 31

fathoms deep, two fathoms, and so on. The thought
of adopting Mark Twain as a nom de guerre was not
original with Clemens ; but the world owes him a
debt of gratitude for making forever famous a
name that, but for him, would have been forever
lost. " There was a man, Captain Isaiah Sellers,
who furnished river news for the New Orleans
Picayune, still one of the best papers in the South,"
Mr. Clemens once confessed to Professor Wm. L.
Phelps. " He used to sign his articles Mark Twain.
He died in 1863. I liked the name, and stole it.
I think I have done him no wrong, for I seem to
have made this name somewhat generally known."

The inglorious escapade of his military career,
at which he himself has poked unspeakable fun, and
for which not even his most enthusiastic biog
raphers have any excuse, was soon ended. Had
his heart really been enlisted on the side of the
South, he would doubtless have stayed at his post.
In reality, he was at that time lacking in conviction ;
and in after life he became a thorough Unionist and
Abolitionist. In the summer of 1861, Governor
Jackson of Missouri called for fifty thousand volun
teers to drive out the Union forces. While visiting
in the small town where his boyhood had been spent,
Hannibal, Marion County, young Clemens and some

32 MARK TWAIN

of his friends met together in a secret place one night,
and formed themselves into a military company.
The spirited but untrained Tom Lyman was made
captain ; and in lieu of a first lieutenant — strange
omission ! — young Clemens was made second lieu
tenant. These fifteen hardy souls proudly dubbed
themselves the Marion Rangers. No one thought
of finding fault with such a name — it sounded
too well. All were full of notions as high-flown as
the name of their company. One of their number,
named Dunlap, was ashamed of his name, because
it had a plebeian sound to his ear. So he solved the
difficulty and gratified his aristocratic ambitions by
writing it d'Unlap. This may serve as a sample
of the stuff of which the company was made.
Dunlap was by no means useless ; for he invented
hifalutin names for the camps, and generally suc
ceeded in proposing a name that was, as his com
panions agreed, " no slouch."

There was no real organization, nobody obeyed
orders, there was never a battle. They retreated,
according to the tale of the humorist, at every sign
of the enemy. In truth, this little band had plenty
of stomach for fighting, despite its loose organization ;
and quite a number fought all through the war.
Mark Twain is doubtless correct in the main, in his

THE MAN 33

assertion that he has not given an unfair picture
of the conditions prevailing in many of the militia
camps in the first months of the war between the
states. The men were raw and unseasoned, and
even the leaders were lacking in the rudiments of
military training and discipline. The situation was
strange and unprecedented, the terrors were none
the less real that they were imaginary. As Mark
says, it took an actual collision with the enemy on
the field of battle to change them from rabbits into
soldiers. Young Clemens, according to his nephew's
account, was first detailed to special duty on the
river because of his knowledge acquired as a pilot ;
it was not long before he was captured and paroled.
Again he was captured, this time sent to St. Louis, and
imprisoned there in a tobacco warehouse. Fearing
recognition and tragic consequences, perhaps court-
martial and death, should he, during the formalities
of exchange, be recognized by the command in Grant's
army which first captured him, he made his escape,
abandoned the cause which he afterwards spoke of \
as " the rebellion," and went west as secretary to
his brother Orion, lately appointed Territorial
Secretary of Nevada by the President.

A very credible and interesting biography of
Mark Twain might be compiled from his own works ;
c

34 MARK TWAIN

and Roughing It is full of autobiography of a coloured
sort, though in the main correct. His joy in the
prospect of that trip, the exciting details of the
long journey, are all narrated with gusto and fine
effect. In the " unique sinecure " of the office of
private secretary, he found he had nothing to do
and no salary ; so after a short time — the fear of
being recognized by Union soldiers and shot for
breaking his parole still haunting him — he, and a
companion, went off together on a fishing jaunt to
Lake Tahoe. Everywhere he saw fortunes made in
a moment. He fell a prey to the prevailing excite
ment and went mad like all the rest. Little wonder
over the wild talk, when cartloads of solid silver
bricks as large as pigs of lead were passing by every
day before their very eyes. The wild talk grew more
frenzied from day to day. And young Clemens
yielded to no one in enthusiasm and excitement.
For vividness or picturesqueness of expression none
could vie with him. With three companions, he
began " prospecting," with the most indifferent
success ; and soon tiring of their situation, they
moved on down to Esmeralda (now Aurora), on the
other side of Carson City. Here new life seemed to
inspire the party. What mattered it if they were
in debt to the butcher — for did they not own thirty

THE MAN 35

thousand feet apiece in the " richest mines on earth " !
Who cared if their credit was not good with the
grocer, so long as they revelled in mountains of
fictitious wealth and raved in the frenzied cant of
the hour over their immediate prospect of fabulous
riches ! But at last the practical necessities of living
put a sudden damper on their enthusiasm. Clemens
was forced at last to abandon mining, and go to
work as a common labourer in a quartz mill, at ten
dollars a week and board — after flour had soared to a
dollar a pound and the rate on borrowed money
had gone to eight per cent, a month. This work was
very exhausting, and after a week Clemens asked
his employer for an advance of wages. The em
ployer replied that he was paying Clemens ten dollars
a week, and thought that all he was worth. How
much did he want ? When Clemens replied that four
hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was
all he could reasonably ask, considering the hard
times, he was ordered off the premises ! In after
days, Mark only regretted that, in view of the arduous
labours he had performed in that mill, he had not
asked seven hundred thousand for his services !

After a time, Mark and his friend Higbie estab
lished their claim to a mine, became mad with
excitement, and indulged in the wildest dreams

36 MARK TWAIN

for the future. Under the laws of the district,
work of a certain character must be done upon the
claim within ten days after location in order to
establish the right of possession. Mark was called
away to the bedside of a sick friend, Higbie failed
to receive Mark's note, and the work was never
done — each thinking it was being properly attended
to by the other. On their return, they discovered
that their claim was " re-located," and that
millions had slipped from their grasp ! The very
stars in their courses seemed to fight to force young
Clemens into literature. Had Samuel Clemens
become a millionaire at this time, it is virtually
certain that there would have been no Mark Twain.
After one day more of heartless prospecting,
Clemens " dropped in " at the wayside post-office. It
was the hour of fate ! A letter awaited him there.
We cannot call it accident — it was the result of
forces and events which had long been converging
toward this end. Samuel Clemens began his career
as an itinerant, tramping " jour " printer. He wrote
for the papers on which he served as printer ; and
he actually read the matter he set up in type. By
observation on his travels, by study of the writing
of others, Clemens acquired information, knowledge
of life, and ingenuity of expression. He hadn't

THE MAN 37

served his ten-years' apprenticeship as a printer for
nothing. In the process of setting up tons of good
and bad literature, he had learned — half uncon
sciously — to appraise and to discriminate. In the
same half -unconscious way, he was actually gaining
some inkling of the niceties of style. After he began
" learning the river," Clemens once wrote a funny
sketch about Captain Sellers which made a genuine
" hit " with the officers on the boat. The sketch fell
into the hands of the " river-editor " of the St. Louis
Republican, found a place in that journal, and was
widely copied throughout the West. On the strength
of it, Clemens became a sort of river reporter, and
from time to time published memoranda and comic
squibs in the Republican. That passion which a
French critic has characterized as distinctively
American, the passion for " seeing yourself in print," X
still burned in Clemens, even during all the hardships
of prospecting and milling. At intervals he sent
from the mining regions of " Washoe," as all that
part of Nevada was then called, humorous letters
signed " Josh " to the Daily Territorial Enterprise
of Virginia City, at that time one of the most
progressive and wide - awake newspapers in the
West.

The fateful letter which I have mentioned, con-

38 MARK TWAIN

tained an offer to Clemens from the proprietor of
the Enterprise, of the position of city editor, at a
salary of twenty-five dollars a week. To Clemens
at this time, this offer came as a perfect godsend.
Twenty-five dollars a week was nothing short of
wealth, luxury. His enthusiasm oozed away when
he reflected over his ignorance and incompetence ;
and he gloomily recalled his repeated failures. But
necessity faced him ; and opportunity knocks but
once at every door. His doubts were speedily
resolved ; and he afterwards confessed that, had
he been offered at that time a salary to translate
the Talmud from the original Hebrew, he would
unhesitatingly have accepted, despite some natural
misgivings, and have tried to throw as much variety
into it as he could for the money. It was to fill a
vacancy, caused by the absence of Dan De Quille, the
regular reporter, on a visit to " the States," that
Clemens was offered this position ; but he retained
it after De Quille returned. " Mark and I had our
hands full," relates De Quille, " and no grass grew
under our feet. There was a constant rush of startling
events ; they came tumbling over one another as
though playing at leap-frog. While a stage robbery
was being written up, a shooting affray started ; and
perhaps before the pistol shots had ceased to echo

THE MAN 39

among the surrounding hills, the firebells were bang
ing out an alarm." A record of the variegated duties
of these two, found in an old copy of the Territorial
Enterprise of 1863, bears the unmistakable hall
marks of Mark Twain. " Our duty is to keep the
universe thoroughly posted concerning murders and
street fights, and balls and theatres, and pack-trains,
and churches, and lectures, and school-houses, and
city military affairs, and highway robberies, and
Bible societies, and hay wagons, and the thousand
other things which it is within the province of local
reporters to keep track of and magnify into undue
importance for the instruction of the readers of a
great daily newspaper. Beyond this revelation every
thing connected with these two experiments of Pro
vidence must for ever remain an impenetrable
mystery." An admirable picture of Mark Twain
on his native heath, in the latter part of 1863, is
given by Edward Per on Kingston, author of The
Genial Showman, in the introduction to the English
edition of The Innocents Abroad.

The fame of the Western humorist had already
reached the ears of Kingston ; and as soon as he
reached Virginia City, he went to the office of the
Territorial Enterprise and asked to be presented
to Mark Twain.

40 MARK TWAIN

When he heard his name called by some one,
Clemens called out :

" Pass the gentleman into my den. The noble
animal is here."

The noble animal proved to be "a young man,
strongly built, ruddy in complexion, his hair of a
sunny hue, his eyes light and twinkling, in manner
hearty, and nothing of the student about him —
one who looked as if he could take his own part in
a quarrel, strike a smart blow as readily as he could
say a telling thing, bluffly jolly, brusquely cordial,
off-handedly good-natured." The picture is de
tailed and vivid : —

"Let it be borne in mind that from the windows of the
newspaper office the American desert was visible ; that within
a radius of ten miles Indians were encamping amongst the
sage-brush ; that the whole city was populated with miners,
adventurers, Jew traders, gamblers, and all the rough-and-
tumble class which a mining town in a new territory collects
together, and it will be readily understood that a reporter for
a daily paper in such a place must neither go about his duties
wearing light kid gloves, nor be fastidious about having gilt
edges to his note-books. In Mark Twain I found the very
man I had expected to see — a flower of the wilderness, tinged
with the colour of the soil, the man of thought and the man of
action rolled into one, humorist and hard-worker, Momus in a
felt hat and jack-boots. In the reporter of the Territorial
Enterprise I became introduced to a Californian celebrity, rich
in eccentricities of thought, lively in fancy, quaint in remark,
whose residence upon the fringe of civilization had allowed his

THE MAN 41

humour to develop without restraint, and his speech to be
rarely idiomatic."

Under the influence of the example of the pro
prietors of the Enterprise, strict stylistic disciplina
rians of the Dana school of journalism, Clemens
learned the advantages of the crisp, direct style x
which characterizes his writing. As a reporter,
he was really industrious in matters that met his
fancy ; but " cast-iron items " — for he hated facts
and figures requiring absolute accuracy — got from
him only " a lick and a promise." He was much
interested in Tom Fitch's effort to establish a literary
journal, The Weekly Occidental. Daggett's opening
chapters of a wonderful story, of which Fitch, Mrs
Fitch, J. T. Goodman, Dan De Quille, and Clemens
were to write successive instalments, gave that
paper the coup de grace in its very first issue. Of
this wonderful novel, at the close of each instalment
of which the " hero was left in a position of such
peril that it seemed impossible he could be rescued,
except through means and wisdom more than
human " ; of the Bohemian days of the " Visigoths,"
— Clemens, De Quille, Frank May, Louis Aldrich,
and their confreres ; of the practical jokes played on
each other, particularly the incident of the imitation
meerschaum (" mere sham ") pipe, solemnly presented

42 MARK TWAIN

to Clemens by Steve Gillis, C. A. V. Putnam, D. E.
McCarthy, De Quille and others — all these belong
to the fascinating domain of the biographer. When
Clemens was sent down to Carson City to report
the meetings of the first Nevada Legislature, he
began for the first time to sign his letters " Mark
Twain." In his Autobiography he has explained
that his function as a legislative correspondent was
to dispense compliment and censure with impartial
justice. As his disquisitions covered about half
a page each morning in the Enterprise, it is easy to
understand that he was an " influence." Questioned
by Carlyle Smith in regard to his choice of
" Mark Twain," Mr. Clemens replied : "I chose
my pseudonym because to nine hundred and ninety-
nine persons out of a thousand it had no meaning,
and also because it was short. I was a reporter in
the Legislature at the time, and I wished to save the
Legislature time. It was much shorter to say in
their debates — for I was certain to be the occasion
of some questions of privilege — ' Mark Twain ' than
' the unprincipled and lying Parliamentary Re
porter of the Territorial Enterprise.' '

Already his name was known the whole length
of the Pacific Coast ; the Enterprise published
many things from his pen which gave him local,

THE MAN 43

and afterwards national, fame ; such sketches as
The Undertaker's Chat, The Petrified Man and The
Marvellous ' Bloody Massacre ' had attracted favour
able and wide notice east of the Rocky Mountains.
But his career in Carson City came to a sudden close
when he challenged the editor of the Virginia Union
to a duel, the bloodless conclusion of which is
narrated in the Autobiography. But even a challenge
to a duel was against the new law of Nevada ; and
obeying the warning of Governor North, the duellists
crossed the border without ceremony, and stood not
upon the order of their going.

While Mark Twain was still with the Enterprise,
he was in the habit of reserving all his " sketches "
for the San Francisco newspapers, the Golden Era
and the Morning Call. He now turns his steps to
that storied city of " Frisco," and was not long in ex
tending his fame on that coast. He was incorrigibly
lazy, as George Barnes, the editor of the Call, soon
discovered ; and Kipling was told when he was in
San Francisco that Mark was in the habit of coiling
himself into a heap and meditating until the last
minute, when he would produce copy having no
relationship to the subject of his assignment —
" which made the editor swear horribly, and the
readers of The Call ask for more." His love for

44 MARK TWAIN

practical joking during the California days brought
him unpopularity ; and one reads in a San Francisco
paper of the early days : " There have been moments
in the lives of various kind-hearted and respectable
citizens of California and Nevada, when, if Mark
Twain were before them as members of a vigilance
committee for any mild crime, such as mule- stealing
or arson, it is to be feared his shrift would have been
short. What a dramatic picture the idea conjures
up, to be sure ! Mark, before these honest men,
infuriated by his practical jokes, trying to show
them what an innocent creature he was when it came
to mules, or how the only policy of fire insurance
he held had lapsed, how void of guile he was in any
direction, and all with that inimitable drawl, that
perplexed countenance and peculiar scraping of
the left foot, like a boy speaking his first piece at
school." If he just escaped disaster, he likewise just
escaped millions ; on one occasion, for the space
of a few moments, he owned the famous Comstock
Lode, which was, though he never suspected it,
worth millions. His trunkful of securities, which
were eminently saleable at one time, proved to be
of fictitious value when " the bottom dropped out "
of the Nevada boom; and that silver mine, which
he was commissioned to sell in New York, was

THE MAN 45

finally sold for three million dollars ! It was, as
Mark says, the blind lead over again. Mark Twain
had the true Midas touch ; but the mine of riches he
was destined to discover was a mine, not of gold or
silver, but the mine of intellect and rich human
experience.

To The Golden Era, Mark Twain, like Prentice
Mulford and Joaquin Miller, contributed freely;
and after a time he became associated with Bret
Harte on The Calif ornian, Harte as editor at twenty
dollars a week, and Mark receiving twelve dollars
for an article. Here forgathered that group of
brilliant writers of the Pacific Slope, numbering
Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard,
Charles Henry Webb, and Prentice Mulford among
its celebrities ; two of that remarkable coterie were
soon destined to achieve world- wide fame. " These
ingenuous young men, with the fatuity of gifted
people," says Mr. Howells, "had established a literary
newspaper in San Francisco, and they brilliantly
co-operated in its early extinction." Of his first
meeting with Mark Twain, Bret Harte has left a
memorable picture : —

" His head was striking. He had the curly hair, the
aquiline nose, and even the aquiline eye — an eye so eagle-
like that a second lid would not have surprised me — of an

46 MARK TWAIN

unusual and dominant nature. His eyebrows were very thick
and bushy. His dress was careless, and his general manner
was one of supreme indifference to surroundings and circum
stances. Barnes introduced him as Mr. Sam Clemens, and
remarked that he had shown a very unusual talent in a number
of newspaper articles contributed over the signature of ' Mark
Twain.' "

Mark tired of the life of literary drudgery in San
Francisco — on one occasion he was reduced to a
solitary ten- cent piece ; and General John McComb
wooed him back to journalism just as he was on the
point of returning to his old work on the Mississippi
River, this time as a Government pilot. During the
earlier years in San Francisco, he was in the habit
of writing weekly letters to the Territorial Enterprise
— personals, market-chat, and the like. But when
he criticized the police department of San Francisco
in the most scathing terms, the officials " found
means for bringing charges that made the author's
presence there difficult and comfortless." So he
welcomed the opportunity to join Steve Gillis in
a pilgrimage to the mountain home of Jim Gillis,
his brother— a " sort of Bohemian infirmary."
Mark Twain revelled in the delightful company of
the original of Bret Harte's " Truthful James,"
and he enjoyed the mining methods of Jackass
Hill, like the true Bohemian that he was. Soon after

THE MAN 47

his arrival, Mark and Jim Gillis started out in search
of golden pockets. As De Quille says : —

" They soon found and spent some days in working up the
undisturbed trail of an undiscovered deposit. They were on
the ' golden bee-line ' and stuck to it faithfully, though it was
necessary to carry each sample of dirt a considerable distance
to a small stream in the bed of a canon in order to wash it.
However, Mark hungered and thirsted to find a big rich pocket,
and he pitched in after the manner of Joe Bowers of old —
just like a thousand of brick.

" Each step made sure by the finding of golden grains, they
at last came upon the pocket whence these grains had trailed
out down the slope of the mountain. It was a cold, dreary
drizzling day when the ' home deposit ' was found. The first
sample of dirt carried to the stream and washed out yielded
only a few cents. Although the right vein had been discovered,
they had as yet found only the tail end of the pocket.

" Returning to the vein, they dug a sample of the decomposed
ore from a new place, and were about to carry it down to the
ravine and test it, when the rain increased to a lively downpour."

Mark was chilled to the bone, and refused to carry
another pail of water. In slow, drawling tones
he protested decisively :

" Jim, I won't carry any more water. This work
is too disagreeable. Let's go to the house and wait
till it clears up."

Gillis was eager to test the sample he had just
taken out.

" Bring just one more pail, Sam," he urged.

" I won't do it, Jim ! " replied the now thoroughly

48 MARK TWAIN

disgusted Clemens. " Not a drop ! Not if I
knew there were a million dollars in that pan ! "

Moved by Sam's dejected appearance — blue nose
and humped back — and realizing doubtless that it
was futile to reason with him further, Jim yielded —
and emptied the sacks of dirt just dug upon the
ground. They now started out for the nearest shelter,
the hotel in Angel's Camp, kept by Coon Drayton,
formerly a Mississippi River pilot. Imagine the
jests and shouts that went around as Mark and
Coon vied with each other in narrating interesting
experiences. For three days the rain and the
stories held out ; and among those told by Drayton
was a story of a frog. He narrated this story with
the utmost solemnity as a thing that had happened
in Angel's Camp in the spring of '49 — the story of
a frog trained by its owner to become a wonderful
jumper, but which failed to " make good " in a
contest because the owner of a rival frog, in order
to secure the winning of the wager, filled the trained
frog full of shot during its owner's absence. This story
appealed irresistibly to Mark as a first-rate story told
in a first-rate way ; he divined in it the magic quality
unsuspected by the narrator — universal humour.
He made notes in order to remember the story,
and on his return to the Gillis' cabin, " wrote it

THE MAN 49

up." He wrote a number of other things besides,
all of which he valued above the frog story; but
Gillis thought it the best thing he had ever
written.

Meantime the rain had washed off the surface
soil from their last pan, which they had left in their
hurry. Some passing miners were astonished to
behold the ground glittering with gold ; they ap
propriated it, but dared not molest the deposit
until the expiration of the thirty- day claim-notice
posted by Jim Gillis. They sat down to wait,
hoping that the claimants would not return. At
the expiration of the thirty days, the claim- jumpers
took possession, and soon cleared out the pocket,
which yielded twenty thousand dollars. It was one
of the most fortunate accidents in Mark Twain's
career. He came within one pail of water of com
parative wealth ; but had he discovered that pocket,
he would probably have settled down as a pocket-
miner, and might have pounded quartz for the rest of
his life. Had his nerve held out a moment longer, he
would never have gone to Angel's Camp, would never
have heard The Story of the Jumping Frog, and
would have escaped that sudden fame which this
little story soon brought him.

On his return to San Francisco, he dropped in one

50 MARK TWAIN

morning to see Bret Harte, and told him this story.
As Harte records :

" He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in
itself irresistible. He went on to tell one of those extravagant
stories, and half-unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and
manner of the original narrator. I asked him to tell it again
to a friend who came in, and they asked him to write it for The
Californian. He did so, and when published it was an
emphatic success. It was the first work of his that had
attracted general attention, and it crossed the Sierras for an
Eastern reading. The story was ' The Jumping Frog of Cala-
veras.' It is now known and laughed over, I suppose, wherever
the English language is spoken ; but it will never be as funny
to anyone in print as it was to me, told for the first time, by
the unknown Twain himself, on that morning in the San
Francisco Mint."

When Artemus Ward passed through California
on a literary tour in 1864, Mark Twain regaled
him — as he regaled all worthy acquaintances —
with his favourite story, The Jumping Frog. Ward
was delighted with it.

" Write it out," he said, " give it all the necessary
touches, and let me use it in a volume of sketches I
am preparing for the press. Just send it to Carleton,
my publisher, in New York."

It arrived too late for Ward's book, and Carleton
presented it to Henry Clapp, who published it in
his paper, The Saturday Press of November 18,
1864. In his Autobiography, Mr. Clemens has narrated

THE MAN 51

how The Jumping Frog put a quietus on The Saturday
Press, and was immediately copied in numerous
newspapers in England and America. He was
always proud of the celebrity that story achieved ;
but he never sought to claim the credit for himself.
He freely admits that it was not Mark Twain, but
the frog, that became celebrated. The author, alas,
remained in obscurity !

Carleton afterwards confessed that he had lost
the chance of a life -time by giving The Jumping
Frog away ; but Mark Twain's old friend, Charles
Henry Webb, came to the rescue and published
it. About four thousand copies were sold in
three years ; but the real fame of the story
was in its newspaper and magazine notoriety.
In 1872 it was translated into the Revue des
Deux Mondes ; and it was almost as widely read
in England, India, and Australia as it was in
America.

Meantime Mark Twain was still awaiting the
rewards of journalism, and doing literary hack
work of one sort or another. In 1866 the pro
prietors of the Sacramento Union employed him to
write a series of letters from the Sandwich Islands.
The purpose of these letters was to give an account
of the sugar industry. Mark told the story of sugar,

52 MARK TWAIN

but, as was his wont, threw in a lot of extraneous
matter that had nothing to do with sugar. It was the
extraneous matter, and not the sugar, that won him
a wide audience on the Pacific Coast. During these
months of " luxurious vagrancy " he described in the
most vivid way many of the most notable features of
the Sandwich Islands. Nowadays such letters would
at once have been embodied in a volume. In his
My Debut as a Literary Person, Mark Twain has
described in admirably graphic style his great
" scoop " of the news of the Hornet disaster ; how
Anson Burlingame had him, ill though he was, carried
on a cot to the hospital, so that he could interview the
half -dead sailors. His bill — twenty dollars a week for
general correspondence, and one hundred dollars a
column for the Hornet story — was paid with all good
will. On the strength of this story, he hoped to
become a " Literary Person, "and sent his account of
the Hornet disaster to Harper's Magazine, where it
appeared in December, 1866. But alas ! he could
not give the banquet he was going to give to celebrate
his debut as a " Literary Person." He had not
written the " Mark Twain " distinctly, and when it
appeared it had been transformed into " Mike
Swain " !

When Mark returned to San Francisco, he resolved

THE MAN 53

to follow the example of Stoddard and Mulford,
and " enter the lecture field." The " extraneous
matter " in his letters to the Sacramento Union had
made him " notorious " ; and, as he put it, " San
Francisco invited me to lecture." The historic
account of that lecture, in Roughing It, is found
elsewhere in this book. Noah Brooks, editor of the
Alia California, who was present at this lecture,
has written the following graphic piece of description :
" Mark Twain's method as a lecturer was distinctly
unique and novel. His slow, deliberate drawl,
the anxious and perturbed expression of his visage,
the apparently painful effort with which he framed
his sentences, and, above all, the surprise that spread
over his face when the audience roared with delight
or rapturously applauded the finer passages of his
word-painting, were unlike anything of the kind
they had ever known. All this was original; it
was Mark Twain." Employing D. E. McCarthy
as his agent, Mark gave a number of lectures at
various places on the Pacific Coast. From this
time forward we recognize in Mark Twain one of
the supreme masters of the art of lecturing in our
time.

In December, 1866, he set out for New York, pre
paratory to the grand tour around the world. His own

54 MARK TWAIN

account of the circular describing the projected trip
is famous. He had proposed, for twelve hundred
dollars in gold, — at the rate of twenty dollars apiece, —
to write a series of letters for the Alia California.
Brooks, the editor, fortified the grave misgivings
of the proprietors over this proposition ; but Colonel
John McComb (then on the editorial staff) argued
vehemently for Mark, and turned the scale in his
favour. While Mark was in New York, he was
urged by Frank Fuller, whom he had known as
Territorial Governor of Utah, to deliver a lecture
— in order to establish his reputation on the Atlantic
coast. Fuller, an enthusiastic admirer of Mark
Twain, overcame all objections, and engaged Cooper
Union for the occasion. Though few tickets were
sold, Fuller cleverly succeeded in packing the hall
by sending out a multitude of complimentary
tickets to the school-teachers of New York City and
the adjacent territory. That lecture proved to be a
supreme success — Mark's reputation as a lecturer
on the Atlantic coast was assured.

On June 10, 1867, the Quaker City set sail for its
Oriental tour. It bore on board a comparatively
unknown person of the name of Clemens, who, in
applying for passage, represented himself to be a
Baptist minister in ill-health from San Francisco !

THE MAN 55

It brought back a celebrity, destined to become
famous throughout the world. Prior to sailing he
arranged to contribute letters to the New York
Tribune and the New York Herald, as well as to the
Alia California.

" His letters to the Alia California," says Noah
Brooks, " made him famous. It was my business
to prepare one of these letters for the Sunday morning
paper, taking the topmost letter from a goodly
pile that was stacked in a pigeon-hole of my desk.
Clemens was an indefatigable correspondent, and
his last letter was slipped in at the bottom of a
tall stack.

" It would not be quite accurate to say that
Mark Twain's letters were the talk of the town ;
but it was very rarely that readers of the paper did
not come into the office on Mondays to confide
to the editors their admiration of the writer, and
their enjoyment of his weekly contributions. The
California newspapers copied these letters, with
unanimous approval and disregard of the copyrights
of author and publisher."

It was the Western humour, and the quaintly
untrammelled American intelligence, focussed upon
diverse and age-encrusted civilizations, which caught
the instantaneous fancy of a vast public. It was

56 MARK TWAIN

a virgin field for the humorous observer ; Europe
"had not yet become the playground of America.
It was rather a terra incognita, regarded with a sort
of reverential ignorance by the average American
tourist. By the range of his humour, the per
tinency of his observation, and the vigour of his
expression he awoke immediate attention. And
he aroused a deeply sympathetic response in the
hearts of Americans by his manly and outspoken
expression — his respect for the worthy, the admirable,
the praiseworthy, his scorn and detestation for the
spurious, the specious and the fraudulent. In this
book, for the first time, he strikes the key-note
of his life and thought, which sounds so clearly
throughout all his later works. It is the true be
ginning of his career.

On his return to the United States in November,
he resumed his newspaper work, this time at the
National Capital. On his arrival there he found a
letter from Elisha Bliss, of the American Publishing
Company, proposing a volume recounting the
adventures of the " Excursion," to be elaborately
illustrated, and sold by subscription on a five per
cent, royalty. He eagerly accepted the offer and set
to work on his notes.

" I knew Mark Twain in Washington," says

THE MAN 57

Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada, *in his
reminiscences A Senator of the Sixties, " at a time
when he was without money. He told me his
condition, and said he was very anxious to get out
his book. He showed me his notes, and I saw that
they would make a great book, and probably bring
him in a fortune. I promised that I would ' stake '
him until he had the book written. I made him a \
clerk to my committee in the senate, which paid
him six dollars per day ; then I hired a man for
one hundred dollars per month to do the work ! "
His mischievously extravagant description of Mark
Twain at this time is eminently worthy of record :
" He was arrayed in a seedy suit which hung upon
his lean frame in bunches, with no style worth
mentioning. A sheaf of scraggly, black hair
leaked out of a battered, old, slouch hat, like
stuffing from an ancient Colonial sofa, and
an evil- smelling cigar butt, very much frazzled,
protruded from the corner of his mouth. He
had a very sinister appearance. He was a man
I had known around the Nevada mining camps
several years before, and his name was Samuel/
L. Clemens."

It was during this winter that Mark wrote a
number of humorous articles and sketches — The

58 MARK TWAIN

Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract, the
account of his resignation as clerk of the Senate
Committee on Conchology, and Riley — Newspaper
Correspondent. His time was chiefly devoted to
preparing the material for his book ; but finding
Washington too distracting, he returned to San
Francisco and completed the manuscript there —
in July, 1868. For a year the publication of the
book was delayed, as recorded in the Autobiography ;
but it finally appeared in print following Mark's
indignant telegram to Bliss that, if the book was
not on sale in twenty-four hours, he would bring
suit for damages. Mark Twain records that in
nine months the book had taken the publishing
house out of debt, advanced its stock from twenty-
five to two hundred, and left seventy thousand
dollars clear profit. Eighty-five thousand copies
were sold within sixteen months, the largest sale of a
four dollar book ever achieved in America in so short
a time up to that date. It is, miraculous to relate,
still the leader in its own special field — a " best
seller " for forty years !

The proprietors of the Alia California were exceed
ing wroth when they heard that Clemens was prepar
ing for publication the very letters which they had
commissioned him to write and had printed in their

THE MAN 59

own paper. They prepared to publish a cheap paper-
covered edition of the letters, and sent the American
Publishing Co. a challenge in the shape of an advance
notice of their publication. Clemens hurried back
to San Francisco from the East, and soon
convinced the proprietors of the Alia California
of the authenticity of his copyright. The paper-
covered edition was then and there abandoned —
forever.

Before leaving the West to settle permanently
in the East, Mark Twain was associated for a short
time with the Overland Monthly, edited by Bret
Harte. In his review of The Innocents Abroad,
Harte asserted that Clemens deserved " to rank
foremost among Western humorists " ; but he was
grievously disappointed in the first few contributions
from Clemens to the Overland Monthly — notably By
Rail through France (later incorporated in The
Innocents Abroad) — because of their perfect gravity.
At last, A Mediaeval Romance — a story which
has been said to contain the germ of A Con
necticut Yankee, because of its burlesque of
medievalism — won the enthusiastic approval of
Bret Harte.

From this time forward, Samuel L. Clemens is
seen in a new environment, in association with new

60 MARK TWAIN

ideas and a new civilization. The history of this
second period does not fall within the scope of the
present work. It has just been narrated with
brilliancy and charm by his close associate and
most intimate friend, Mr. William Dean Howells,
in his admirable book My Mark Twain. In the
subsequent portion of the present work attention
will be directed solely to those features of Mark
Twain's life which have a direct bearing upon his
career as a man of letters, and which throw
into relief the progressive development of his
genius.

The South and the West contributed to Mark
Twain's development, and added to his store of
vital experience, in greater measure than all the
other influences of his life combined. From the
inexhaustible well of those experiences he drew
ever fresh contributions for the satisfaction of the
world. His mind was stocked with the rich, crude
ore of early experience — the romance and the reality
of a life full of prismatic variations of colour. The
civilization of the East, its culture and refinement,
tempered the genius of Mark Twain in conformity
with the indispensable criteria of classic art. Under
the broadening influence of its persistent nationalism,
he became more deeply, more profoundly, imbued

THE MAN 61

with the comprehensive ideals of American democ
racy. He never lost the first fine virginal spontaneity
or* His native style, never weakened in the vigour
of his thought or in the primitiveness of his expression,
His contact with the East compassed the liberation
of that vast fund of stored-up early experiences,
acquired through grappling with life in many a
rude encounter.

Out of its own life, the East never contributed to
Mark Twain's works, in any appreciably momentous
way, either volume or immensity of fertile, suggestive .
human experience. If we eliminate from the list
of Mark Twain's works those books which have
their roots deep set in the soil of South and West,
we eliminate the most priceless assets of his art.
Indeed, it may be doubted whether, were those
works struck from the catalogue of his contributions,
Mark Twain could justly rank as a great genius.
To his association with the South and the Southwest
are due Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Pudd'nhead
Wilson, and Life on the Mississippi. The Jumping
Frog and Roughing It belong peculiarly to the
West, and even The Innocents Abroad falls wholly
within the period of Mark Twain's influence by
the West, its standards, outlook, and localized view
point.

62 MARK TWAIN

Colonel Mulberry Sellers is a veritably human
type, the embodiment, laughably lovable, of a
temperamental phase of American character in the
course of the national development. But The Gilded
Age has long since disappeared from that small
but tremendously significant group of works which
are tentatively destined to rank as classics. Much
as I enjoy the satiric comedy of A Yankee in King
Arthur's Court, I have always felt that it set before
Europe an American type which is neither elevating

nor inspiring — nor national. It tends to the
\/

gratification of England and Europe, even in the
face of its democratic demolition of feudalistic
survival, by sealing a certain cheap type of vulgarity
with the national stamp. One must, nevertheless,
confess with regret that this type is the embodiment
of an " ideal " still only too commonly cherished
in America. The national type, I take it, is found
in such characters as Lincoln and Phillips Brooks,
in Lee and Henry W. Grady, in Charles W. Eliot
and Edwin A. Alderman, and not in a provincial
Connecticut Yankee, jovial and whole-hearted
though he be. I say this without forgetting or
minimizing for a moment the art displayed in effecting
the devastating and inimitably humorous contrast
of a present with a remotely past civilization. Joan

THE MAN 63

of Arc has no local association, being a pure work
of the heart, the chivalric impulse of a noble spirit.
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, viewed from
any standpoint, is a masterpiece ; but its significance
lies, not in the locality of its setting, but in the
universality of its moral.

In a word, it was the East which broadened and
universalized the spirit of Mark Twain. We shall
see, later on, that it steadily fostered in him a spirit
of true nationalism and hardy democracy. But
it was the South and the West which lavishly gave
him of their most priceless riches, and thereby
created in Mark Twain an unique and incomparable
genius, the veritable type and embodiment of their
inalienably individual life and civilization. This
first phase of the life of Mark Twain has been so
strongly stressed here, because the first half of his
life has always seemed to me to have been a period
of — shall I say ? — God-appointed preparation for
the most significant and lastingly permanent
work of the latter half, namely, the narration
of the incidents of early experience, and the
imaginative reminting of the gold of that ex
perience.

One has only to read Mark Twain's works
to learn the real history of his life. There were

64 MARK TWAIN

momentous episodes in the latter half of his
career ; but they were concerned with his life
rather than with his art. We cannot, indeed,
say what or how profound is the effect of life
and experience on art. There was the happy
marriage, the tragic losses of wife and children.
There were the associations with the culture and
art- circles of America and Europe — New England,
New York, Berlin, Vienna, London, Glasgow ; the
academic degrees — Missouri, Yale ; finally ancient
Oxford for the first time conferring the coveted
honour of its degree upon a humorist; the honours
his own country delighted to bestow upon him.
And there too was that gallant struggle to pay off
a tremendous debt, begun at sixty — and accomplished
one year sooner than he expected — after the most
spectacular and remarkable lecture tour in history.
The beautiful chivalric spirit of this great soul
shone brightest in disaster. He insisted that it was
his wife who refused to compromise his debts for
forty cents on the dollar — that it was she who
declared it must be dollar for dollar ; and when a
fund was raised by his admirers to assist in lightening
his burden, that it was his wife who refused to accept
it, though he was willing enough to accept it as a
welcome relief.

THE MAN 65

As an American, I can say nothing more signifi
cantly characteristic of the man than that he was
a good citizen. He possessed in rich measure the
consciousness of personal responsibility for the
standards, government, and ideals of his town, his
city, and his country. Civic conscientiousness burned
strong within him ; and he fought to develop and
to maintain breadth of public view and sanity of
popular ideals. Blind patriotism was impossible
for this great American : he exposed the shallow-
ness of popular enthusiasms and the narrowness
of rampant spread-eagleism, without regard for
consequence to himself or his popularity. What a
tribute to his personality that, instead of suffering,
he gained in popularity by his honest and down
right outspokenness ! He wielded the lash of his
bitter scorn and fearful irony upon the wrong-doer,
the hypocrite, the fraud ; and aroused public opinion
to impatience with public abuse, open offence, and
official discourtesy.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens impressed me as the
most complete and human individual I have ever
known. He was not a great thinker ; his
views were not " advanced." The glory of his
temperament was its splendid sanity, balance, and
normality. The homeliest virtues of life were his —

66 MARK TWAIN

the republican virtue of simplicity ; the domestic
virtue of personal purity and passionately simple
regard for the sanctity of the marriage bond ;
the civic virtue of public honesty ; the business
virtue of stainless private honour. Mark Twain
was one of the supreme literary geniuses of his
time. But he was something even more than this.
He was not simply a great genius : he was a great
man.

III. THE HUMORIST

" Exhilaration can be infinite, like sorrow ; a joke can be so
big that it breaks the roof of the stars. By simply going
on being absurd, a thing can become godlike; there is but
one step from the ridiculous to the sublime."

GILBERT K. CHESTERTON : Charles Dickens.

THE HUMORIST

NOT without wide significance in its bearing upon
the general outlines of contemporary literature is
the circumstance that Mark Twain served his
apprenticeship to letters in the high school of
journalism. Like his contemporaries, Artemus
Ward and Bret Harte, he first found free play for
his comic intransigeance in the broad freedom of
the journal for the masses. Brilliant as he was,
Artemus Ward seemed most effective only when
he spoke in weird vernacular through the grotesque
mouthpiece of his own invention. Bret Harte
sacrificed more and more of the native flavour of
his genius in his progressive preoccupation with the
more sophisticated refinements of the purely literary.
Mark Twain never lost the ruddy glow of his first
inspiration, and his style, to the very end, remained
as it began — journalistic, untamed, primitive.

Both Rudyard Kipling and Bernard Shaw, who
like Mark Twain have achieved comprehensive
international reputations, have succeeded in pre
serving the early vigour and telling directness

v

70 MARK TWAIN

acquired in journalistic apprenticeship. It was by
the crude, almost barbaric, cry of his journalese that
Rudyard Kipling awoke the world with a start.
That trenchant and forthright style which imparts
such an air of heightened verisimilitude to his plays,
Bernard Shaw acquired in the ranks of the new
journalism. " The writer who aims at producing
the platitudes which are ' not for an age, but for
all time,'" says Bernard Shaw, "has his reward
in being unreadable in all ages ; whilst Plato and
Aristophanes trying to knock some sense into the
Athens of their day, Shakespeare peopling that
same Athens with Elizabethan mechanics and
Warwickshire hunts, Ibsen photographing the local
doctors and vestrymen of a Norwegian parish,
Carpaccio painting the life of St. Ursula exactly as
if she were a lady living in the next street to him,
are still alive and at home everywhere among the
dust and ashes of many thousands of academic,
punctilious, most archseologically correct men of
letters and art who spent their lives haughtily
avoiding the journalists' vulgar obsession with the
ephemeral." Mark Twain began his career by
studying the people and period he knew in relation
to his own life. Jamestown, Hannibal, and Virginia
City, the stately Mississippi, and the orgiastic,

THE HUMORIST 71

uproarious life of Western prairie, mountain, and
gulch start to life and live again in the pages of his
books. Colonel Sellers, in the main correct but
" stretched a little " here and there ; Tom Sawyer,
the " magerful " hero of boyhood ; the shrewd and
kindly Aunt Polly, drawn from his own mother ;
Huck Finn, with the tender conscience and the
gentle heart — these and many another were drawn
from the very life. In writing of his time d propos
of himself, Mark Twain succeeded in telling the
truth about humanity in general and for any time.
In the main — though there are noteworthy ex
ceptions — Mark Twain's works originated funda
mentally in the facts of his own life. He is a master \
humorist — which is only another way of saying that J
he is a master psychologist with the added gift of
humour — because he looked upon himself always
as a complete and well-rounded repository of uni
versally human characteristics. Humanus sum ; et
nil humanum mihi alienum est — this might well
have served for his motto. It was his conviction
that the American possessed no unique and peculiar
human characteristics differentiating him from the
rest of the world. In the same way, he regarded
himself as possessing no unique or peculiar human
characteristics differentiating him from the rest of

72 MARK TWAIN

the human race. Like Omar he might have said :
"I myself am Heaven and Hell" — for within
himself he recognized, in some form, at higher or
lower power, every feature, trait, instinct, char
acteristic of which a human being is capable. The
last half century of his life, as he himself said in his
Autobiography, had been constantly and faithfully
devoted to the study of the human race. His
knowledge came from minute self-examination —
for he regarded himself as the entire human race
compacted together. It was by concentrating his
attention upon himself, by recognizing jm. himself
the quintessential type of the race, that he succeeded
in producing works of such pure naturalness and

(utter verity. A humour which is at bottom good
humour is always contagious ; but there is a deeper
and more universal appeal which springs from genial
and unaffected representation of the human species,
of the universal Genus Homo.

It has been said, by foreign critics, that the in
tellectual life of America in general takes its cue
from the day, whilst the intellectual life of Europe
derives from history. If American literature be
really " Journalism under exceptionally favourable
conditions," as defined by the Danish critic, Johannes
V. Jensen, then must Mark Twain be a typical

THE HUMORIST 73

product of American literature. A certain modicum
of truth may rest in this startling and seemingly
uncomplimentary definition. Interpreted liberally,
it may be taken to mean that America finds her
key to the future in the immediate vital present,
rather than in a remote and hazy past. Mark
Twain was a great creative genius because he saw
himself, and so saw human nature, in the strong,
searching light of the living present. He is the
greatest genius evolved by natural selection out of
the ranks of American journalism. Crude, rudi
mentary and boisterous as his early writing was,
at times provincial and coarse, it bore upon
its face the fresh stamp of contemporary
actuality.

To the American of to-day, it is not a little ex
asperating to be placidly assured by our British
critics that America is sublimely unconscious that
her childhood is gone. And this gay paradox is
less arresting than the asseveration that America
is lacking in humour because she is lacking in self-
knowledge. There is a certain grimly comic irony
in this commiseration with us, on the part of our
British critics, for our failure joyously to realize
our old age, which they would have us believe is
a sort of premature senescence and decay. The

74 MARK TWAIN

New World is pitied for her failure to know without
illusion the futility of the hurried pursuit of wealth,
of the passion for extravagant opulence and in
ordinate display, of all the hostages youth in America
eternally gives to old age. " America has produced
great artists," admits Mr. Gilbert Chesterton. Yet
he maintains that " that fact most certainly proves
that she is full of a fine futility and the end of all
things. Whatever the American men of genius
are, they are not young gods making a young world.
Is the art of Whistler a brave, barbaric art, happy
and headlong ? Does Mr. Henry James infect us
with the spirit of a schoolboy ? . . . Out of America
has come a sweet and startling cry, as unmistakable
as the cry of a dying man." This sweet and startling
cry is less startling than the obvious reflection that
Mr. Chesterton has chosen to illustrate his ludicrous
paradox, the two American geniuses who have lived
outside their own country, absorbed the art ideals
of the older, more sophisticated civilizations, and
lost touch with the youthful spirit, the still almost
barbaric violence, the ongoing rush and progress
of America. It is worthy of remark that Mr. James
has always maintained that Mark Twain was capable
of amusing only very primitive persons ; and Whistler,
with his acid diablerie, was wholly alien in spirit to

THE HUMORIST 75

the boisterous humour of Mark Twain. That other
brilliant but incoherent interpreter of American
life, Mr. Charles Whibley, bound to the presupposed
paradox of America's pathetic senescence and total
deficiency in humour, blithely gives away his case
in the vehement assertion that America's greatest
national interpreter is — Mark Twain !

To the general, Mark Twain is, first and foremost
and exclusively, the humorist — with his shrieking
Philistinism, his dominant sense for the colossally
incongruous, his spontaneous faculty for staggering**'
ludicrous contrast. To the reflective, Mark Twairi
subsumed within himself a " certain surcharge and
overplus of power, a buoyancy, and a sense of
conquest " which typified the youth of America.
It is memorable that he breathed in his youth the
bracing air of the prairie, shared the collective
ardour of the Argonauts, felt the rising thrill of
Western adventure, and expressed the crude and
manly energy of navigation, exploration, and the
daring hazard for new fortune. To those who knew
him in personal intimacy, the quality that was
outstanding, omnipresent and eternally ineradicable
from his nature was — paradoxical as it may sound —
not humour, not wit, not irony, not a thousand other
terms that might be associated with his name, but

76 MARK TWAIN

— the spirit of eternal youth. It is comprehensively
significant and conclusive that, to the day of her
death, Mrs. Clemens never called her husband any
thing but the bright nickname — " Youth." Mark
Twain is great as humorist, admirable as teller of
tales, pungent as stylist. But he has achieved
another sort of eminence that is peculiarly gratifying
to Americans. " They distinguish in his writings,"
says an acute French critic, " exalted and sublimated
by his genius, their national qualities of youth and
of gaiety, of force and of faith ; they love his philos
ophy, at once practical and high-minded. They
are fond of his simple style, animated with verve
and spice, thanks to which his work is accessible
to every class of readers. They think he describes
his contemporaries with such an art of distinguishing
their essential traits, that he manages to evoke, to
create even, characters and types of eternal verity.
They profess for Mark Twain the same sort of
vehement admiration that we have in France for
Balzac."

Whilst Mark Twain has solemnly averred that
humour is a subject which has never had much
interest for him, it is nothing more than a common
place to say that it is as a humorist, and as a humorist
only, that the world seems to persist in regarding

THE HUMORIST

him. The philosophy of his early life was what
George Meredith has aptly termed the " philosophy
of the Broad Grin." Mr. Gilbert Chesterton once
said that " American humour, neither unfathomably
absurd like the French, nor sharp and sensible and
full of the realities of life like the Scotch, is simply
the humour of imagination. It consists in piling
towers on towers and mountains on mountains ; of
heaping a joke up to the stars and extending it
the end of the world." This partial and somewhat
conventional foreign conception of American humour
is admirably descriptive of the cumulative and
" sky-breaking " humour of the early Mark Twain.
Then no exaggeration was too absurd for him, no
phantasrn too unreal, no climax too extreme.

The Jiumouh of that day was the humour bred
of a barbaric freedom and a lawless, untrammelled
life. Mark Twain grew up with a civilization but
one remove from barbarism ; supremacy in marks
manship was the arbiter of argument ; the greatest
joke was the discomfiture of a fellow- creature. In
the laughter of these wild Westerners was something
at once rustic and sanguinary. The refinements
of art and civilization seemed effeminate, artificial,
to these rude spirits, who laughed uproariously at
one another, plotted dementedly in circumvention of

78 MARK TWAIN

each other's plans, and gloried in their defiance of both
man and God. Deep in their hearts they cherished
tenderness for woman, sympathy for the weak and
the afflicted, and generosity indescribable. And
yet they prided themselves upon their barbaric
rusticity, glorying in a native cunning bred of their
wild life and sharpened in the struggle for existence.
What, after all, is The Jumping Frog but the elaborate
narrative, in native vernacular, of a shrewd practical
joke ? As Mark Twain first heard it, this story
was a solemn recital of an interesting incident in
the life of Angel's Camp. It was Mark Twain who
" created " the story : he endowed with the comic
note of whimsicality that imaginative realization
of une chose vue, which went round the world.
The humour of rustic shrewdness in criticism of art,
so elaborately exploited in The Innocents Abroad,
was displayed, perhaps invented, by Mark Twain
in the early journalistic days in San Francisco.
In The Golden Era an excellent example is found
in the following observations upon a celebrated
painting of Samson and Delilah, then on exhibition
in San Francisco :

" Now what is the first thing you see in looking
at this picture down at the Bank Exchange ? Is it
the gleaming eye and fine face of Samson ? or the

THE HUMORIST 79

muscular Philistine gazing furtively at the lovely
Delilah ? or is it the rich drapery ? or is it the
truth to nature in that pretty foot ? No, sir. The
first thing that catches the eye is the scissors at her
feet. Them scissors is too modern ; thar warn't

no scissors like them in them days — by a d d

sight."

That was a brilliant and audacious conception,
having the just proportion of sanguinary humour,
embodied in Mark Twain's offer, during his lecture
on the Sandwich Islands, to show his audience
how the cannibals consume their food — if only
some lady would lend him a live baby. There is
the same wildly humorous tactlessness in the delicious
anecdote of Higgins.

Higgins was a simple creature, who used to haul
rock; and on the day Judge Bagley fell down the
court-house steps and broke his neck, Higgins was
commissioned to carry the body in his wagon to the
house of Mrs. Bagley and break the news to her as
gently as possible. When he arrived, he shouted
until Mrs. Bagley came to the door, and then tactfully
inquired if the Widder Bagley lived there ! When
she indignantly replied in the negative, he gently
humoured her whim ; and inquired next if Judge
Bagley lived there. When she replied that he did,

80 MARK TWAIN

Higgins offered to bet that he didn't ; and delicately
inquired if the Judge were in. On being assured
that he was not in at present, Higgins triumphantly
exclaimed that he expected as much. Because —
he had the old Judge curled up out there in the
wagon ; and when Mrs. Bagley saw him, she would
doubtless admit that about all that could comfort
the Judge now would be an inquest !

Mark Twain was so fond of this bloody and ghastly
humour that, on one occasion, he utterly over
reached himself and suffered serious consequences.
In the words of his fellow- journalist, Dan De Quille : —

Mark Twain was fond of manufacturing items of the horrible
style, but on one occasion he overdid this business, and the
disease worked its own cure. He wrote an account of a terrible
murder, supposed to have occurred at " Dutch Nick's," a station
on the Carson River, where Empire City now stands. He made
a man cut his wife's throat and those of his nine children,
after which diabolical deed the murderer mounted his horse,
cut his own throat from ear to ear, rode to Carson City (a
distance of three and a half miles) and fell dead in front of
Peter Hopkins' saloon.

All the California papers copied the item, and several made
editorial comment upon it as being the most shocking occurrence
of the kind ever known on the Pacific Coast. Of course rival
Virginia City papers at once denounced the item as a " cruel
and idiotic hoax." They showed how the publication of such
" shocking and reckless falsehoods" disgraced and injured the
State, and they made it as " sultry " as possible for the Enter
prise and its " fool reporter."

THE HUMORIST 81

When the California papers saw all this and found they had
been sold, there was a howl from Siskiyou to San Diego.
Some papers demanded the immediate discharge of the author
of the item by the Enterprise proprietors. They said they
would never quote another line from that paper while the
reporter who wrote the shocking item remained on its force.
All this worried Mark as I had never before seen him worried.
Said he : " I am being burned alive on both sides of the
mountains." We roomed together, and one night, when the
persecution was hottest, he was so distressed that he could not
sleep. He tossed, tumbled, and groaned aloud. So I set to
work to comfort him. " Mark," said I, " never mind this bit
of a gale, it will soon blow itself out. This item of yours will
be remembered and talked about when all your other work is
forgotten. The murder at Dutch Nick's will be quoted years
from now as the big sell of these times."

Said Mark : " I believe you are right ; I remember I
once did a thing at home in Missouri, was caught at it, and
worried almost to death. I was a mere lad, and was going to
school in a little town where I had an uncle living. I at once
left the town and did not return to it for three years. When I
finally came back I found I was only remembered as { the boy
that played the trick on the schoolmaster.' "

Mark then told me the story, began to laugh over it, and
from that moment " ceased to groan." He was not discharged,
and in less than a month people everywhere were laughing
and joking about the "murder at Dutch Nick's."

Out of that full, free Western life, with its tre
mendous hazards of fortune, its extravagant alterna
tions from fabulous wealth to wretched poverty,
its tremendous exaggerations and incredible contrasts,
was evolved a humour as rugged, as mountainous,
F

82 MARK TWAIN

and as altitudinous as the conditions which gave it
birth. Mark Twain may be said to have created,
and made himself master of, this new and fantastic
humour which, in its exaggeration and elaboration,
was without a parallel in the history of humorous
narration. At times it seemed little more than a
sort of infectious and hilarious nonsense ; but in
reality it had behind it all the calculation of detail
and elaboration. There was something in it of the
volcanic, as if at the bursting forth of some pent-
up force of primitive nature. It consisted in piling
Pelion on Ossa, until the structure toppled over of
its own weight and fell with a stentorian crash of
laughter which echoed among the stars. Whenever
Mark Twain conceived a humorous idea, he seemed
capable of extracting from it infinite complications
of successive and cumulative comedy. This humour
seemed like the mental functionings of some mad,
yet inevitably logical jester ; it grew from more toi
more, from extravagance to extravagance, until
reason itself tired and gave over. Such explosive*
stories as How I edited an Agricultural Paper, A
Genuine Mexican Plug, the deciphering of the Horace
Greeley correspondence, The Facts in the Case of
the Great Beef Contract, and many another, as Mr.
Chesterton has pointed out, have one tremendous

THE HUMORIST 83

essential of great art. " The excitement mounts up
perpetually ; they grow more and more comic, as
a tragedy should grow more and more tragic. The
rack, tragic or comic, goes round until something
breaks inside a man. In tragedy it is his heart,
or perhaps his stiff neck. In farce I do not quite
know what it is — perhaps his funny-bone is dis
located ; perhaps his skull is slightly cracked."
Mark Twain's mountainous humour, of this early
type, never contains the element of final surprise, y
of the sudden, the unexpected, the imprevu. We
know what is coming, we surrender ourselves more
and more to the mood of the narrator, holding
ourselves in reserve until laughter, no longer to be
restrained, bursts forth in a torrent of undignified
and explosive mirth. Perhaps no better example
can be given than the description of the sad fate
of the camel in A Tramp Abroad.

In Syria, at the head-waters of the Jordan, this
camel had got hold of his overcoat ; and after he
finished contemplating it as an article of apparel,
he began to inspect it as an article of diet. In his
inimitable manner, Mark describes the almost religious
ecstasy of that camel as it devoured his overcoat
piecemeal — first one sleeve, then the other, velvet
collar, and finally the tails. All went well until the

84 MARK TWAIN

camel struck a batch of manuscript — containing some
of Mark's humorous letters for the home papers.
Their solid wisdom soon began to lie heavy on the
camel's stomach : the jokes shook him until he
began to gag and gasp, and finally he struck state
ments that not even a camel could swallow with
impunity. He died in horrible agony ; and Mark
found on examination that the camel had choked
to death on one of the mildest statements of fact
that he had ever offered to a trusting public ! Here
Mark gradually works up to an anticipated climax
by piling on effect after effect. Our risibility is
excited almost as much by the anticipation of the
climax as by the recital.

Admirable instances of the ludicrous incident, of
the nonsensical recital, are found in the scene in
Huckleberry Finn dealing with the performance of
the King's Cameleopard or Royal Nonesuch, the
address on the occasion of the dinner in honour
of the seventieth anniversary of John Greenleaf
Whittier (an historic failure), and the Turkish bath
in The Innocents Abroad.

In this prison filled with hot air, an attendant
sat him down by a tank of hot water and began to
polish him all over with a coarse mitten. Soon
Mark noticed a disagreeable smell, and realized that

THE HUMORIST 85

the more he was polished the worse he smelt. He
urged the attendant to bury him without unnecessary
delay, as it was obvious that he couldn't possibly
" keep " long in such warm weather. But the
phlegmatic attendant paid no attention to Mark's
commands and continued to scrub with renewed
vigour. Mark's consternation changed to alarm when
he discovered that little cylinders, like macaroni,
began to roll from under the mitten. They were too
white to be dirt. He felt that he was gradually being
pared down to a convenient size. Realizing that it
would take hours for the attendant to trim him down
to the proper size, Mark indignantly ordered him to
bring a jackplane at once and get the matter over.
To all his protests the attendant paid no attention
at all.

In one of the earliest critical articles about Mark
Twain, which appeared in Appleton's Journal of
Literature, Science and Art for July 4, 1874, Mr. G. T.
Ferris gives an excellent appreciation of his humour.
" Of humour in its highest phase," he says, " perhaps
Bret Harte may be accounted the most puissant
master among our contemporary American writers.
Of wit, we see next to none. Mark Twain, while
lacking the subtilty and pathos of the other, has
more breadth, variety, and ease. His sketches of

86 MARK TWAIN

life are arabesque in their strange combinations.
Bits of bright, serious description, both of landscape
and society, carry us along till suddenly we stumble on
some master-stroke of grotesque and irresistible fun.
He understands the value of repose in art. One
tires of a page where every sentence sparkles with
points, and the author is constantly attitudinizing
for our amusement. We like to be betrayed into
laughter as much in books as in real life. It is the
unconscious, easy, careless gait of Mark Twain that
makes his most potent charm. He seems always to
be catering as much to his own enjoyment as to that
of the public. He strolls along like a great rollicking
schoolboy, bent on having a good time, and deter
mined that his readers shall have it with him."

Mark Twain is the most daring of humorists.
He takes his courage in his hands for the wildest
flights of fancy. His humour is the caricature of
situations, rather than of individuals ; and he is
not afraid to risk his characters in colossally ludicrous
situations. His art reveals itself in choosing ludicrous
situations which contain such a strong colouring
of naturalness that one's sense of reality is not
outraged, but titillated. Hence it is that his humour,
in its earlier form, does not lend itself readily to
quotation. His early humour is not epigrammatic,

THE HUMORIST 87

but cumulative and extensive. Each scene is a
unit and must appear as such. Andrew Lang not
inaptly catches the note of Mark Twain's earlier
manner, when he speaks of his " almost Mephis
tophelean coolness, an unwearying search after the
comic sides of serious subjects, after the mean possi
bilities of the sublime — these with a native sense of
incongruities and a glorious vein of exaggeration."

Mark Twain began his career as a wag ; he rejoiced
in being a fun-maker. He discarded the weird
spellings and crude punning of his American fore
runners ; his object was not play upon words, but
play upon ideas. He offered his public, as Frank
R. StocFtoiTpointed out, the pure ore of fun. " If
he puts his private mark on it, it will pass current ;
it does not require the mint stamp of the schools of
humour. He is never afraid of being laughed at."
Indeed, that is a large part of his stock-in-trade ;
for throughout his entire career, nothing seemed to
give him so much pleasure — though it is one of the
lowest forms of humour — as making fun of himself.
In describing two monkeys that got into his room
at Delhi, he said that when he awoke, one of them
was before the glass brushing his hair, and the other
one had his notebook, and was reading a page of
humorous notes and crying. He didn't mind the

88 MARK TWAIN

one with the hair-brush ; but the conduct of the
other one cut him to the heart. He never forgave
that monkey. His apostrophe, with tears, over the
tomb of Adam — only to be fully appreciated in
connexion with his satiric indignation over the drivel
of the maudlin Mr. Grimes, who " never bored, but
he struck water " — is an admirable example of the
mechanical fooling of self-ridicule.

In his penetrating study, Mark Twain a Century
Hence, published at the time of Mr. Clemens' death,
Professor H. T. Peck makes this observation : " We
must judge Mark Twain as a humorist by the very
best of all he wrote rather than by the more dubious
productions, in which we fail to see at every moment
the winning qualities and the characteristic form of
this very interesting American. As one would not
judge of Tennyson by his dramas, nor Thackeray
by his journalistic chit-chat, nor Sir Walter Scott
by those romances which he wrote after his fecundity
had been exhausted, so we must not judge Mark
Twain by the dozen or more specimens which belong
to the later period, when he was ill at ease and growing
old. Let us rather go back with a sort of joy to
what he wrote when he did so with spontaneity,
when his fun was as natural to him as breathing,
and when his humour was all American humour —

THE HUMORIST 89

not like that of Juvenal or Hierocles — acrid, or devoid
of anything individual — but brimming over with
exactly the same rich irresponsibility which belonged
to Steele and Lamb and Irving. It may seem odd
to group a son of the New World and of the great
West with those earlier classic figures who have been
mentioned here ; yet upon analysis it will be dis
covered that the humour of Mark Twain is at least
first cousin to that which produced Sir Roger de
Coverley and Rip Van Winkle and The Stout
Gentleman."

The details of the Gambetta - Fourtou duel, in
which Mark played a somewhat frightened second,
have furnished untold amusement to thousands.
And his description of the inadvertent faux pas he
committed at his first public lecture is humorous
for any age and society. The sign announcing the
lecture read — " Doors open at 7i. The Trouble will
begin at 8." For three days, Mark had been in a
state of frightful suspense. Once his lecture had
seemed humorous ; but as the day approached, it
seemed to him to be but the dreariest of fooling,
without a vestige of real fun. He was so panic-
stricken that he persuaded three of his friends, who
were giants in stature, genial and stormy voiced, to
act as claquers and pound loudly at the faintest

90 MARK TWAIN

suspicion of a joke. He bribed Sawyer, a half-drunk
man, who had a laugh hung on a hair-trigger, to
get off, naturally and easily during the course of the
evening, as many laughs as he could. He begged a
popular citizen and his wife to take a conspicuous
seat in a box, so that everybody could see them.
He explained that when he needed help, he would
turn toward her and smile, as a signal, that he had
given birth to an obscure joke. Then, if ever,
was her time — not to investigate, but to respond !

The fateful night found him in the depths of
dejection. But heartened up by a crowded house,
full even to the aisles, he bravely set in and proceeded
to capture the house. His claquers hammered madly
whenever the very feeblest joke showed its head.
Sawyer supported their herculean efforts with bursts
of stentorian laughter. As Mark explained, not
without a touch of pride, inferior jokes never fared
so royally before. But his hour of humiliation was
at hand. On delivering a bit of serious matter with
impressive unction, to which the audience listened
with rapt interest, he glanced involuntarily, as if
for her approval, at his friend in the box. He re
membered the compact, but it was too late — he
smiled in spite of himself. Forth came her ringing
laugh, peal after peal, which touched off the whole

THE HUMORIST 91

audience : the explosion was immense ! Sawyer
choked with laughter, and the bludgeons performed
like pile-drivers. The little morsel of pathos was
ruined ; but what matter, so long as the audience
took it as an intentional joke, and applauded it with
unparalleled enthusiasm. Mark wisely let it go
at that !

Reading through The Innocents Abroad after
many years, I find that it has not lost its power to
provoke the most side-splitting laughter ; and the
same may be said of A Tramp Abroad and Following
the Equator, which, whilst not so boisterously comi
cal, exhibit greater mastery and restraint. His own
luck, as Mark Twain observed on one occasion,
had been curious all his literary life. He never
could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a
truth that anybody would believe. Could there
be a more accurate or more concise definition of the
effect of his writings, in especial of his travel notes ?
Like his mother, he too never used large words,
but he had a natural gift for making small ones
do effective work. How delightfully human is
his comment on the vagaries of woman's shop
ping ! Human nature he found very much the
same all over the world ; and he felt that it was so
much like his dear native home to see a Venetian

92 MARK TWAIN

lady go into a store, buy ten cents' worth of blue
ribbon, and then have it sent home in a scow.
It was such little touches of nature as this which,
as he said, moved him to tears in those far-off lands.
In speaking of Palestine, he says that its holy places
are not as deliriously beautiful as the books paint
them. Indeed, he asserts that if one be calm and
resolute, he can look on their beauty and live ! He
bequeathed his rheumatism to Baden-Baden. It
was little, but it was all he had to give. His only
regret was that he could not leave something more
catching.

There is nothing better in all of The Innocents
Abroad than his analysis of the theological hierarchy
of the Roman Catholic Church. Disclaiming all
intention to be frivolous, irreverent or blasphemous,
he solemnly declared that his observations had taught
him the real way the Holy Personages were ranked
in Rome. " The Mother of God," otherwise the
Virgin Mary, comes first, followed in order by the
Deity, Peter, and some twelve or fifteen canonized
Popes and Martyrs. Last of all came Jesus Christ
the Saviour — but even then, always as an infant
in arms !

Who can ever forget the Mark Twain who kissed
the Hawaiian stranger for his mother's sake, the

THE HUMORIST 93

while robbing him of his small change ; who was so
struck by the fine points of his Honolulan horse
that he hung his hat on one of them ; who
rode glaciers as gaily as he rode Mexican plugs,
and found diverting programmes of the Roman
Coliseum, in the dust and rubbish of two thousand
years ago !

Samuel L. Clemens achieved instantaneous and
world- wide popularity at a single bound by the
creation of a fantastic and delightfully naive char
acter known as " Mark Twain." At a somewhat
later day, Bernard Shaw achieved world-wide fame
by the creation of a legendary and fantastic wit
known as " G. B. S." To the composition of " Mark
Twain " went all the wild humour of ignorance — the ^
boisterously comic admixture of the sanguinary
and the stoical. The humour of The Jumping Frog
and The Innocents Abroad is the savage and naive
humour of the mining camp, not the sophisticated
humour of civilization. It is significant that Mme.
Blanc, a polished and refined intelligence, found
the nil admirari attitude of " Mark Twain " no
more enlightening nor suggestive than the stoicism
of the North American Indian. This mirthful and
mock-innocent naivete, so alien to the delicate and A
subtle spirit of the French, found instant response

94 MARK TWAIN

in the heart of the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic
peoples. The English and the Germans, no less
than the Americans, rejoiced in this gay fellow
with his combination of appealing ignorance and
but half -concealed shrewdness. They laughed at
this unsophisticated na'if, gazing in wide-eyed wonder
ment at all he saw ; and they delighted in the
* consciousness that, behind this thin mask, lay an
acute and searching intelligence revelling in the
humorous havoc wrought by his keen perception
of the contrasts and incongruities of life. The
note of this early humour is perfectly caught in the
incident of the Eygptian mummy. Deliberately
assumed ignorance of the grossest sort, by Mark
Twain and his companions, had the most devastating
effect upon the foreign guide — one of that countless
tribe to all of whom Mark applied the generic name
of Ferguson. After driving Ferguson nearly mad with
pretended ignorance, they finally asked him if the
mummy was dead. When Ferguson glibly replied
that he had been dead three thousand years, he was
dumbfounded at the fury of the " doctor " for being
imposed upon with vile second-hand carcases. The
poor Frenchman was warned that if he didn't bring
out a nice, fresh corpse at once, they would brain him !
No wonder that, later, when he was asked for a

THE HUMORIST 95

description of the party, Ferguson laconically re
marked that they were lunatics !

In speaking of contemporary society, Ibsen once
remarked : " We have made a fiasco both in the
heroic and the lover roles. The only parts in which
we have shown a little talent, are the naively
comic ; but with our more highly developed self-
consciousness we shall no longer be fitted even for
that." With time and " our more highly developed
self -consciousness " have largely passed the novelty
and the charm of this early naively comic humour of
Mark Twain. But it is as valid still, as it was in
1867, to record honestly the impressions directly
communicated to one by the novelties, peculiarities,
individual standards and ideals of other peoples and
races. Mark Twain spoke his mind with utter dis
regard for other people's opinions, the dicta of
criticism or the authoritative judgment of the
schools. The Innocents Abroad is eminently read
able, not alone for its humour, its clever journalism,
its remarkably accurate and detailed information,
and its fine descriptions. The rare quality, which
made it " sell right along — like the Bible," is that
it is the vital record of a keen and searching
intelligence. Mark Twain found so many of the
"^masterpieces of the world " utterly unimpressive

96 MARK TWAIN

and meaningless to him, that he actually began to
distrust the validity of his own impressions. Every
time he gloried to think that for once he had dis
covered an ancient painting that was beautiful and
worthy of all praise, the pleasure it gave him was
an infallible proof that it was not a beautiful picture,
nor in any sense worthy of commendation ! He
pours out the torrents of his ridicule, not indis
criminately upon the works of the old masters
themselves — though he regarded Nature as the
grandest of all the old masters — but upon those
half-baked sycophants who bend the knee to an art
they do not understand, an art of which they feign
comprehension by mouthings full of cheap and
meaningless tags. As potent and effective as ever,
in its fine comic irony, is that passage in which he
expresses his " envy " of those people who pay
lavish lip-service to scenes and works of art which
their expressionless language shows they neither
realize nor understand. He reserves his most biting
condemnation for those second-hand critics who
accept other people's opinions for their criteria,
and rave over " beauty," " soul," " character,"
" expression " and " tone " in wretched, dingy,
moth-eaten pictures. He hated with the heartiest
detestation such people — whose sole ambition seemed

THE HUMORIST 97

to be to make a fine show of knowledge of art by
means of an easily acquired vocabulary of inexpres
sive technical terms of art criticism.

There is much, I fear, of misguided honesty in
Mark Twain's records of foreign travel. To the
things which he personally reverenced, he was always
reverential ; and his expression of likes and dislikes,
of prejudices and predilections, was honest and
fearless. Grant as we may the humorist's right to
exaggerate and even to distort, for the purposes of
his fun-making, it does not therefore follow that
his judgments, however forthright or sincere, are
valid, reputable criticisms. One's enjoyment of his
fresh and hilarious humour, his persistent fun-making
is no whit impaired by the recognition that he was
lacking in the faculty of historic imagination and in
the finer artistic sense. It is, in a measure, because
of his lack of culture and, more broadly, lack of real
knowledge, that he was enabled to evoke the laughter
of the multitude. " The Mississippi pilot, homely,
naive, arrogantly candid," says Mr. S. P. Sherman,
" refuses to sink his identity in the object con
templated — that, as Corporal Nym would have said,
is the humour of it. He is the kind of travelling
companion that makes you wonder why you went
abroad. He turns the Old World into a laughing-

98 MARK TWAIN

stock by shearing it of its storied humanity — simply
because there is nothing in him to respond to the
glory that was Greece, to the grandeur that was
Rome — simpler because nothing is holier to him than
a joke. He does not throw the comic light upon
counterfeit enthusiasm ; he laughs at art, history, and
antiquity from the point of view of one who is
ignorant of them and mightily well satisfied with his
ignorance." This picture reminds us of the foreign
critics of The Innocents Abroad and A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthurs Court : it is too partial
and restricted. The whole point of Mark Twain's
humour, as exhibited in these travel notes, is missed
in the statement that " he does not throw the
comic light upon counterfeit enthusiasm " —for this
might almost be taken as the " philosophy " of
his books of foreign travel. And yet Mr. Sherman's
dictum, in its entirety, quite clearly provokes the
question whether, as he intimates, the " over
whelming majority " of his fellow-citizens also
were not mightily pleased with Mark Twain's point
of view, and whether they did not enjoy them
selves hugely in laughing, not at him, but with
him.

In commenting on the reasons for the broadening
and deepening of his humour with the passage of

THE HUMORIST 99

time, Mr. Clemens once remarked to me : "I suc
ceeded in the long run, where Shillaber, Doesticks,
and Billings failed, because they never had an ideal
higher than that of merely being funny. The first
great lesson of my life was the discovery that I had
to live down my past. When I first began to lecture,
and in my earlier writings, my sole idea was to make
comic capital out of everything I saw and heard.
My object was not to tell the truth, but to make
people laugh. I treated my readers as unfairly
as n treated everybody else — eager to betray them
at the end with some monstrous absurdity or
some extravagant anti- climax. One night, after
a lecture in the early days, Tom Fitch, the ' silver-
tongued orator of Nevada,' said to me : ' Clemens,
your lecture was magnificent. It was eloquent,
moving, sincere. Never in my entire life have I
listened to such a magnificent piece of descriptive
narration. But you committed one unpardonable
sin — the unpardonable sin. It is a sin you must
never commit again. You closed a most eloquent
description, by which you had keyed your audience
up to a pitch of the intensest interest, with a piece
of atrocious anti- climax which nullified all the really
fine effect you had produced. My dear Clemens,
whatever you do, never sell your audience.' And

100 MARK TWAIN

that," continued Mr. Clemens, " was my first really
profitable lesson."

It was the toning down of his youthful extrava
gance — Fitch's precept not to " sell " his audience,
Mrs. Fairbanks' warning not to try their endurance
of the irreverent too far — that had a markedly
salutary effect upon Mark Twain's humorous writings.
There can be no doubt that the deep and lifelong
friendship of Mr. Howells, expressing itself as occasion
demanded in the friendliest criticism, had a subduing
influence upon Mark Twain's tendency, as a humorist,
to extravagance and headlong exaggeration. In
time he left the field of carpet-bag observation —
the humorous depicting of things seen from the
rear of an observation car, so to speak — and turned
to fiction. Now at last the long pent-up flood of
observation upon human character and human
characteristics found full vent. Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn are the romances of eternal youth,
the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. They are
freighted, however, with a wealth of pungent and
humorous characterization that have made of them
contemporary classics. From ethical sophistication
and moral truantry Mark Twain evolves an in
exhaustible supply of humour. The revolt of mis
chievous and Bohemian boyhood against the stern

THE HUMORIST 101

limitations of formal Puritanism is, in a sense, a
principle that he carried with him to the grave.
" There are no more vital passages in his fiction,"
says Mr. Howells, " than those which embody char
acter as it is affected for good as well as for evil by
the severity of the local Sunday-schooling and
church-going." Out of the pangs of conscience,
the ingenious sedatives of sophistry, the numerous
variations of the lie, he won a wholesome humour
that left you thinking, by inversion, upon the
moral involved. Knowledge of human nature finds
expression in forms made permanently effective
through the arresting permeation of humour. The
incident of Tom Sawyer and the whitewashing of
the fence is the sort of thing over which boy
and man alike can chuckle with satisfaction — for
Tom Sawyer had discovered a great law of human
action without knowing it, namely, that in order to
make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only neces
sary to make the thing difficult to attain. Huck's
reasoning about chicken stealing — the exquisitely
comic shifting of ground from morality to expediency
— is a striking example of the best type of Mark
Twain's humour. Following his father's example,
Huck would occasionally " lift " a chicken that
wasn't roosting comfortable ; for had his father not

102 MARK TWAIN

told him that even if he didn't want the chicken
himself, he could always find somebody that did
want it, and a good deed ain't never forgot ? Huck
confesses that he had never seen his Pap when he
didn't want the chicken himself !

The germ of Mark Twain's humour, wherever it is
found, from The Innocents Abroad to The Connecticut
Yankee and Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, is
found in the mental reactions resulting from stu
pendous and glaring contrasts. First it is the
Wild Western humorist, primitive and untamed,
running amuck through the petrified formulas and
encrusted traditions of Europe. Then comes the
fantastic juxtaposition of the shrewd Connecticut
Yankee, with his comic irreverence and raucous
sense of humour, his bourgeois limitations and
provincial prejudices, to the Court of King Arthur,
with its medievalism, its primitive rudeness and
social narrowness. How many have delighted in
the Yankee's inimitable description of his feelings
toward that classic damsel of the sixth century ?
At first he got along easily with the girl ; but after
a while he began to feel for her a sort of mysterious
and shuddery reverence. Whenever she began to
unwind one of those long sentences of hers, and got
it well under way, he could never suppress the feeling

THE HUMORIST 103

that he was standing in the awful presence of the
Mother of the German Language !

Mark Twain ransacked the whole world of his
own day, all countries, savage and civilized, for
the display of effective and ludicrous contrast ; and
he opened up an illimitable field for humanizing
satire, as Mr. Howells has said, in his juxtaposition
of sociologic types thirteen centuries apart. Not
even heaven was safe from the comprehensive
survey of his satire; and Captain Storm field9 8 Visit
tcTTTedven is a remarkable document, — a forthright
lay sermon, — the conventional idea of heaven, the
theologic conception of eternity, as heedlessly taught
from the pulpit, thrown into comic, yet profoundly
significant, relief against the background of the
common-sense of a deeply human, thoroughly
modern intelligence.

Humour, as Thackeray has defined it, is a com
bination of wit and love. Certain it is that, in
the case of Mark Twain, wit was a later develop
ment of his humour ; the love was there all
the time. Mark Twain has not been recognized as
a wit ; for he was primarily a humorist, and only
secondarily a wit. But the passion for brief
and pungent formulation of an idea grew upon
him ; and Pudfnhead Wilson's Calendar is a

104 MARK TWAIN

mine of homely and memorable aphorism, epigram,
injunction.

According to Mark Twain's classification, the comic
story is English, the witty story French, the humorous
story American. While the other two depend upon
matter, the humorous story depends for its effect
upon the manner of telling. The witty story and
the comic story must be concise and end with a
" point " ; but the humorous story may be as leisurely
as you please and have no particular destination.
Mark Twain always maintained that, while anyone
could tell effectively a comic or a witty story, it
required a person skilled in an art of a rare and dis
tinctive character to tell a humorous story success
fully. Mark Twain was himself the supreme exemplar
of the art of telling a humorous story. Take this
little passage, for example, which convulsed one of his
London audiences. He was speaking of a high
mountain that he had come across in his travels.
" It is so cold that people who have been there find
it impossible to speak the truth ; I know that's
a fact (here a pause, a blank stare, a shake of the
head, a little stroll across the platform, a sigh, a
puff, a smothered groan), because — I've — (another
pause) — been — (a longer pause) — there myself."
Who could equal Mark Twain as a humorous narrator,

THE HUMORIST 105

in his recital of the alarums and excursions, crimina
tions and recriminations, over the story of somebody
else's dog he sold to General Miles for three dollars ?
He delighted numerous audiences with his story of
inveighing Mrs. Grover Cleveland at a White House
reception into writing blindly on the back of a card :
" He didn't." When she turned it over she dis
covered that it bore on the other side, in Mrs. Clemens'
handwriting, the startling words : " Don't wear
your arctics in the White House." I shall never
forget his recital of the story of how his enthusiasm
oozed away at a meeting in behalf of foreign missions.
So moving was the fervid eloquence of the exhorter
that, after fifteen minutes, if Mark Twain had had a
blank cheque with him, he would gladly have turned
it over, signed, to the minister, to fill out for any
amount. But it was a very warm evening, the
eloquence of the minister was inexhaustible — and
Mark Twain's enthusiasm for foreign missions slowly
oozed away — one hundred dollars, fifty dollars, and
even lower still — so that when the plate was actually
passed around, Mark put in ten cents and took out
a quarter !

I was a witness in London, and at Oxford, in 1907,
of the vast, spontaneous, national reception which
Mark Twain received from the English people. One

106 MARK TWAIN

incident of that memorable visit is a perfect example
of that masterly power over an audience, that deep
humanity, with which Mark Twain was endowed.
At the banquet presided over by the Lord Mayor
of Liverpool, which was the signal of Mark Twain's
farewell to the English people, his peroration was
as follows :

" Many and many a year ago I read an anecdote
in Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. A frivolous
little self-important captain of a coasting-sloop in
the dried-apple and kitchen-furniture trade was
always hailing every vessel that came in sight,
just to hear himself talk and air his small grandeurs.
One day a majestic Indiaman came ploughing by,
with course on course of canvas towering into the
sky, her decks and yards swarming with sailors, with
macaws and monkeys and all manner of strange
and romantic creatures populating her rigging, and
thereto her freightage of precious spices lading the
breeze with gracious and mysterious odours of the
Orient. Of course, the little coaster- cap tain hopped
into the shrouds and squeaked a hail : ' Ship ahoy !
What ship is that, and whence and whither ? ' In a
deep and thunderous bass came the answer back,
through a speaking trumpet : ' The Begum of Bengal,
a hundred and twenty-three days out from Canton —

THE HUMORIST 107

homeward bound ! What ship is that ? ' The little
captain's vanity was all crushed out of him, and most
humbly he squeaked back : ' Only the Mary Ann —
fourteen hours from Boston, bound for Kittery Point
with — with nothing to speak of ! ' That eloquent
word ' only ' expressed the deeps of his stricken
humbleness.

" And what is my case ? During perhaps one
hour in the twenty-four — not more than that — I
stop and reflect. Then I am humble, then I am
properly meek, and for that little time I am ' only
the Mary Ann ' — fourteen hours out, and cargoed
with vegetables and tin- wear ; but all the other
twenty-three my self-satisfaction rides high, and I am
the stately Indiaman, ploughing the great seas under
a cloud of sail, and laden with a rich freightage of the
kindest words that were ever spoken to a wandering
alien, I think ; my twenty- six crowded and fortunate
days multiplied by five ; and I am the Begum of
Bengal, a hundred and twenty- three days out from
Canton — homeward bound ! "

Says " Charles Vale," in describing the scene :

4 The audience sat spellbound in almost painful

silence, till it could restrain itself no longer ; and

when in rich, resonant, uplifted voice Mark Twain

sang out the words : ' I am the Begum of Bengal,

108 MARK TWAIN

a hundred and twenty- three days out from Canton,'
there burst forth a great cheer from one end of the
room to the other. It seemed an inopportune
cheer, and for a moment it upset the orator : yet it
was felicitous in opportuneness. Slowly, after a
long pause, came the last two words — like that
curious, detached and high note in which a great
piece of music suddenly ends — ' Homeward bound.'
Again there was a cheer : but this time it was lower ;
it was subdued ; it was the fitting echo to the beauti
ful words — with their double significance — the parting
from a hospitable land, the return to the native land.
. . . Only a great litterateur could have conceived
such a passage : only a great orator could have so
delivered it."

Mark Twain was the greatest master of the anecdote
this generation has known. He claimed the humorous
story as an American invention, and one that has
remained at home. His public speeches were little
mosaics in the finesse of their art ; and the intri
cacies of inflection, insinuation, jovial innuendo which
Mark Twain threw into his gestures, his implicative
pauses, his suggestive shrugs and deprecative nods
— all these are hopelessly volatilized and disappear
entirely from the printed copy of his speeches.
He gave the most minute and elaborate study to

THE HUMORIST 109

the preparation of his speeches — polishing them
dexterously and rehearsing every word, every
gesture, with infinite care. Yet his readiness and
fertility of resource in taking advantage, and making
telling use, of things in the speeches of those immedi
ately preceding him, were striking evidences of the
rapidity of his thought-processes. In Boston, when
asked what he thought about the existence of a
heaven or a hell, he looked grave for a moment,
and then replied : "I don't want to express an
opinion. It's policy for me to keep silent. You
see, I have friends in both places." His speech
introducing General Hawley of Connecticut to a
Republican meeting at Elmira, New York, is an
admirable example of his laconic art : " General
Hawley is a member of my church at Hartford,
and the author of ' Beautiful Snow.' Maybe he
will deny that. But I am only here to give him a
character from his last place. As a pure citizen,
I respect him ; as a personal friend of years, I have
the warmest regard for him ; as a neighbour, whose
vegetable garden adjoins mine, why — why, I watch
him. As the author of ' Beautiful Snow,' he has
added a new pang to winter. He is a square, true
man in honest politics, and I must say he occupies
a mighty lonesome position. So broad, so bountiful

110 MARK TWAIN

is his character that he never turned a tramp empty-
handed from his door, but always gave him a letter
of introduction to me. Pure, honest, incorruptible,
that is Joe Hawley. Such a man in politics is like
a bottle of perfumery in a glue factory — it may
modify the stench, but it doesn't destroy it. I
haven't said any more of him than I would say of
myself. Ladies and gentlemen, this is General
Hawley."

Mr. Chesterton maintains that Mark Twain was a
wit rather than a humorist — perhaps something more
than a humorist. " Wit," he explains, " requires
an intellectual athleticism, because it is akin to
logic. A wit must have something of the same
running, working, and staying power as a mathe
matician or a metaphysician. Moreover, wit is a
fighting thing and a working thing. A man may
enjoy humour all by himself ; he may see a joke
when no one else sees it ; he may see the point and
avoid it. But wit is a sword ; it is meant to make
people feel the point as well as see it. All honest
people saw the point of Mark Twain's wit. Not a
few dishonest people felt it." The epigram, " Be
virtuous, and you will be eccentric," has become
a catchword ; and everyone has heard Mark Twain's
reply to the reporter asking for advice as to what

THE HUMORIST 111

to cable his paper, which had printed the statement
that Mark Twain was dead : " Say that the state
ment is greatly exaggerated." He has admirably
taken off humanity's enduring self-conceit in the
statement that there isn't a Parallel of Latitude but
thinks it would have been the Equator if it had had
its rights. There is something peculiarly American
in his warning to young girls not to marry — that is,
not to excess ! His remarks on compliments have a
delightful and naive freshness. He points out how
embarrassing compliments always are. It is so
difficult to take them naturally. You never know
what to say. He had received many compliments
in his lifetime, and they had always embarrassed
him — he always felt that they hadn't said enough !
The incident of Mark Twain's first meeting with
Whistler is quaintly illustrative of one phase of his
broader humour. Mark Twain was taken by a
friend to Whistler's studio, just as he was putting
the finishing touches to one of his fantastic studies.
Confident of the usual commendation, Whistler in
quired his guest's opinion of the picture. Mark Twain
assumed the air of a connoisseur, and approaching
the picture remarked that it did very well, but —
" he didn't care much for that cloud — " ; and suiting
the action to the word, appeared to be on the point

MARK TWAIN

of rubbing the cloud with his gloved finger. In
genuine horror, Whistler exclaimed : " Don't touch
it, the paint's wet ! " " Oh, that's all right," replied
Mark with his characteristic drawl : " these aren't
my best gloves, anyhow ! " Whereat Whistler re
cognized a congenial spirit, and their first hearty
laugh together was the beginning of a friendly and
congenial relationship.

I recall an incident in connection with the writing
of his Autobiography. On more than one occasion,
he declared that the Autobiography was going to
be something awful — as caustic, fiendish, and devilish
as he could make it. Actually, he was in the habit
of jotting on the margin of the page, opposite to some
startling characterization or diabolic joke : " Not
to be published until ten (or twenty, or thirty) years
after my death." One day I heard him vent his
pent-up rage, in bitter and caustic words, upon a
certain strenuous, limelight American politician. I
could not resist the temptation to ask him if this, too,
were going into the Autobiography. " Oh yes,"
he replied, decisively. " Everything goes in. I
make no exceptions. But," he added reflectively,
with the suspicion of a twinkle in his eye, " I shall
make a note beside this passage : 6 Not to be published
until one hundred and fifty years after my death ' ! "

THE HUMORIST

Mark Twain had numerous " doubles " scattered
about the world. The number continually increased ;
once a month on an average, he would receive a
letter from a new " double," enclosing a photograph
in proof of the resemblance. Mark once wrote to
one of these doubles as follows :

MY DEAR SIR —

Many thanks for your letter, with enclosed
photograph. Your resemblance to me is remarkable.
In fact, to be perfectly honest, you look more like
me than I look like myself. I was so much impressed
by the resemblance that I have had your picture
framed, and am now using it regularly, in place of a
mirror, to shave by.

Yours gratefully,

S. L. CLEMENS.

Although not generally recognized, it is un
doubtedly true that Mark Twain was a wit as well
as a humorist. He was the author of many epigrams
and curt aphorisms which have become stock phrases
in conversation, quoted in all classes of society
wherever the English language is spoken. His phras
ing is unpretentious, even homely, wearing none of
the polished brilliancy of La Rochefoucauld or Bernard
Shaw ; but Mark Twain's sayings " stick " because
H

114 MARK TWAIN

they are rooted in shrewdness and hard common-
sense.

Mark Twain's warning to the two burglars who
stole his silverware from " Stormfield " and were
afterwards caught and sent to the penitentiary, is
very amusing, though not highly complimentary to
American political life : —

" Now you two young men have been up to my
house, stealing my tinware, and got pulled in by these
Yankees up here. You had much better have stayed
in New York, where you have the pull. Don't you
see where you're drifting. They'll send you from
here down to Bridgeport jail, and the next thing you
know you'll be in the United States Senate. There's
no other future left open to you."

The sign he posted after the visitation of these
same burglars was a prominent ornament of the
billiard room at " Stormfield " : —

NOTICE
To the next Burglar

There is nothing but plated-ware in this house,
now and henceforth. You will find it in that brass
thing in the dining-room over in the corner by the
basket of kittens. If you want the basket, put the
kittens in the brass thing.

THE HUMORIST 115

Do not make a noise, it disturbs the family.
You will find rubbers in the front hall, by that
thing which has the umbrellas in it, chiffonnier, I
think they call it, or pergola, or something like
that.

Please close the door when you go away !
Very truly yours,

S. L. CLEMENS.

Now these are examples of Mark Twain's humour,
American humour, such as we are accustomed to
expect from Mark Twain — humour not unmixed with
a strong spice of wit. But Mark Twain was capable
of wit, pure and unadulterated, curt and concise. I
once saw him write in a young girl's birthday book
an aphorism which he said was one of his favourites :
"Truth is our most valuable possession. Let us
economize it." The advice he once gave me as to the
proper frame of mind for undergoing a surgical opera
tion has always remained in my memory : " Console
yourself with the reflection that you are giving the
doctor pleasure, and that he is getting paid for it."
Peculiarly memorable is his forthright dictum that
the statue which advertises its modesty with a
fig-leaf brings its modesty under suspicion. His
business motto — unfortunately, a motto that he

116 MARK TWAIN

never followed — has often been attributed, because
of its canny shrewdness, to Mr. Andrew Carnegie.
The idea was to put all your eggs in one basket — and
then — watch that basket I His anti-Puritanical con
victions find concrete expression in his assertion that
few things are harder to put up with than the annoy
ance of a good example. Truly classic, in usage if
not in form, is his happy saying that faith is believing
what you know ain't so. His definition of a classic
as a book which people praise but don't read, is as
frequently heard as are Biblical and Shakespearian
tags.

Mr. Clemens once told me that he had composed
between two and three hundred maxims during his
life. Many of them, especially those from the old
and new calendars of Pudd'nhead Wilson, bear the
individual and peculiar stamp of Mark Twain's
phraseology and outlook upon life — quaint, genial,
and shrewd. In pursuance of his deep-rooted belief
in the omnipotent power of training, he remarked
that the peach was once a bitter almond, the cauli
flower nothing but cabbage with a college education.
He himself was not guiltless of that irreverence which
he defined as disrespect for another man's god.
Women took an almost unholy delight in describing
some of their undesirable acquaintances, in Mark

THE HUMORIST 117

Twain's phrase, as neither quite refined, nor quite
unrefined, but just the kind of person that keeps
a parrot !

At times, Mark Twain realized the sanctifying
power of illusions in a world of harsh realities ; for
he asserted that when illusions are gone you may
still exist, but you have ceased to live. A depress
ing sense of world-weariness sometimes overbore the
native joyousness of his temperament ; and he
expressed his sense of deep gratitude to Adam,
the first great benefactor of the race — because
he had brought death into the world. A funeral
always gave Mark Twain a sense of spiritual uplift,
a sense of thankfulness because the dead friend had
been set free. He thought it was far harder to
live than to die.

In one of his early sketches, there was admirable
wit in the suggestion to the organist for a hymn
appropriate to a sermon on the Prodigal Son : —

" Oh ! we'll all get blind drunk
When Johnny comes marching home ! "

And in The Innocents Abroad there is the same sort
of brilliant wit in the mad logic of his innocent
query, on learning that St. Philip Neri's heart was
so inflamed with divine love that it burst his ribs :

118 MARK TWAIN

" I was curious to know what Philip had for dinner."
Mark Twain was capable of epigrams worthy, in
their dark levity, of Swift himself. In speaking of
Pudd'nhead Wilson, Anna E. Keeling has said :
" Humour there is in almost every scene and every
page ; but it is such humour as sheds a wild gleam
on the greatest Shakespearian tragedies — on the
deep melancholy of Hamlet, the heartbreak of Lear."
The greatest ironic achievements of Mark Twain,
in brief compass, are the two stories : The Man that
Corrupted Hadleyburg and Was it Heaven or Hell?
They reveal the power and subtlety of his art as an
ironic humorist — or shall we rather say, ironic wit ?
For they range all the way from the most mordant
to the most pathetic irony — from Mephistophelean
laughter to warm, human tears

" Sunt lachrymce rerum."

" Make a reputation first by your more solid
achievements," counselled Oliver Wendell Holmes.
" You can't expect to do anything great with
Macbeth, if you first come on flourishing Paul Pry's
umbrella." Mark Twain has had to pay in full the
penalty of comic greatness. The world is loth to
accept a popular character at any rating other than
its own. Whosoever sets himself the task of amusing

THE HUMORIST 119

the world must realize the almost insuperable
difficulty of inducing the world to regard him as a
serious thinker. Says Moliere —

" Oest une etrange entreprise que celle
defaire rire les honnetes gens."

The strangeness of the undertaking is no less
pronounced than the rigour of its obligations. Mark
Twain began his career as a professional humorist
and fun-maker ; he frankly donned the motley, the
cap and bells. The man-in- the- street is not easily
persuaded that the basis of the comic is, not un
common nonsense, but glorified common-sense.
The French have a fine-flavoured distinction in
ce qui remue from ce qui emeut ; and if remuage is
the defining characteristic of A Tramp Abroad,
Roughing It, and The Innocents Abroad, there is
much of deep seriousness and genuine emotion in
Life on the Mississippi, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry
Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. In the course of
his lifetime, Mark Twain evolved from a fun-maker
into a masterly humorist, from a sensational journalist
into a literary artist. In explanation of this, let
us recall the steps in that evolution. In his youth,
this boy had no schooling worth speaking of ; he
lived in an environment that promised only stagna
tion and decay. As the young boy, barefooted and

120 MARK TWAIN

dirty, watched the steamboats pass and repass
upon the surface of that great inland deep, the
Mississippi, he conceived the ambition and the
ideal of learning to know and to master that mysteri
ous water. His dream, in time, was realized ; he not
only became a pilot, but — which is infinitely more
significant — he changed from a callow, indolent,
unobservant lad, with undeveloped faculties, to a
man, a master of the river, with a knowledge which,
in its accuracy and minuteness, was, for its purpose,
all-sufficient and complete.

I have always felt that, had it not been for this
training in the great university of the Mississippi,
Mark Twain might never have acquired that trained
/ faculty for minute detail and descriptive elaboration
without which his works, full of flaws as they are,
might never have revealed the very real art which
they betray. For the art of Mark Twain is the art
of taking infinite pains — the art of exactitude,
precision and detail. Humour per se is as ephemeral
as the laugh — dying in the very moment of its birth.
Art alone can give it enduring vitality. Mark
Twain's native temperament, rich with humour
and racy of the soil, drank in the wonder of the
river and unfolded through communication with
all its rude human devotees ; the quick mind, the

THE HUMORIST

eager susceptibility, developed and matured through
rigorous education in particularity and detail ;
and before his spirit the very beauties of Nature
herself disappeared in face of a consuming sense of
the work of the world that must be done.

Mark Twain never wholly escaped the penalty
that his reputation as a humorist compelled him to
pay. He became more than popular novelist, more
than a jovial entertainer : he became a public
institution, j as unmistakable and as national as
the Library of Congress or the Democratic Party.
/Even in the latest years of his life,jthough long since
dissociated in fact from the category of Artemus
Ward, John Phoenix, Josh Billings, and Petroleum
V. Nasby,| Mark Twain could never be sure that his
most solemn utterance might not be drowned in
roars of thoughtless laughter.

" It has been a very serious and a very difficult
matter," Mr. Clemens once said to me, " to doff the
mask of humour with which the public is accustomed,
in thought, to see me adorned. It is the incor
rigible practice of the public, in this or in any
country, to see only humour in the humorist, how-
ever serious his vein. I Not long ago I wrote a poem,
which I never dreamed of giving to the public, on
account of its seriousness ; but on being invited

122 MARK TWAIN

to address the women students of a certain great
university, I was persuaded by a near friend to
read this poem. At the close of my lecture I said :
c Now, ladies, I am going to read you a poem of
mine ' — which was greeted with bursts of uproarious
laughter. ' But this is a truly serious poem,' I
asseverated — only to be greeted with renewed and,
this time, more uproarious laughter. Nettled by
this misunderstanding, I put the poem in my pocket,
saying, ' Well, young ladies, since you do not believe
me to be serious, I shall not read the poem ' — at which

* the audience almost went into convulsions of laughter. ' '
Humour is a function of nationality. The same
joke, as related by an American, a Scotchman, an
Irishman, a Frenchman, carries with it a distinctive
racial flavour and individuality of approach. Indeed,
it is open to question whether most humour is not
essentially local in its nature, requiring some
specialized knowledge of some particular locality.
It would be quite impossible for an Italian on his
native heath to understand that great political
satirist, "Mr. Dooley," on the Negro Problem, for
example. After reading George Ade's Fables in

, Slang, Mr. Andrew Lang was driven to the desperate
conclusion that humour varies with the parallels of
latitude, a joke in Chicago being a riddle in London !

THE HUMORIST 123

If one would lay his finger upon the secret of Mark
Twain's world-wide popularity as a humorist, he
would find that secret, primarily, in the universality
and humanity of his humour. Mark Twain is a
master in the art of broad contrast ; incongruity
lurks on the surface of his humour ; and there is
about it a staggering and cyclopean surprise. But
these are mere surface qualities, more or less common,
though at lower power, to all forms of humour.
Nor is his international vogue as a humorist to be
attributed to any tricks of style, to any breadth of
knowledge, or even to any depth of intellectuality.
His hold upon the world is due to qualities, not of
the head, but of the heart. I once heard Mr. Clemens
say that humour is the key to the hearts of men,
for it springs from the heart ; and worthy of record
is his dictum that there is far more of feeling than of
thought in genuine humour.

Mark Twain succeeded in " tickling the midriff
of the English-speaking races " with a single story ;
and in time he showed himself to be, not only
a man of letters, but also a man of action. His
humour has been defined as the sunny break of his
serious purpose. Horace Walpole has said that the
world is a comedy to the man of thought, a tragedy
to the man of feeling. To the great humorist — to

124 MARK TWAIN

Mark Twain — the world was a tragi- comedy. Like
fimile Faguet, he seemed at times to feel that grief
is the most real and important thing in the world
— because it separates us from happiness. He was
an exemplar of the highest, truest, sincerest humour,
perfectly fulfilling George Meredith's definition :
" If you laugh all round him, tumble him, roll him
about, deal him a smack, and drop a tear on him,
own his likeness to you and yours to your neighbour,
spare him as little as you shun, pity him as much
as you expose, it is the spirit of Humour that is
moving you." Mark Twain's fun was light-hearted
and insouciant, his pathos genuine and profound.
" He is, above all," said that oldest of English
journals, The Spectator, " the fearless upholder of all
that is clean, noble, straightforward, innocent, and
manly. . . . If he is a jester, he jests with the mirth
of the happiest of the Puritans ; he has read much of
English knighthood, and translated the best of it
into his living pages ; and he has assuredly already
won a high degree in letters in having added more
than any writer since Dickens to the gaiety of the
Empire of the English language."

Mark Twain's humour flowed warm from the
heart. He enjoyed to the utmost those two in
alienable blessings : " laughter and the love of

THE HUMORIST 125

friends." He woke the laughter of an epoch and
numbered a world for his friends. " He is the
true consolidator of nations," said Mr. Augustine
Birrell. "His delightful humour is of the kind
which dissipates and destroys national prejudices.
His truth and his honour, his love of truth and his
love of honour, overflow all boundaries. He has
made the world better by his presence."

IV. THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS

" Art transmitting the simplest feelings of common life, but
such, always, as are accessible to all men in the whole world —
the art of common life — the art of a people — universal art."

TOLSTOY : What is Art?

.1*

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS

SOME years ago a group of Mark Twain's friends, in
a spirit of fun, addressed a letter to

MARK TWAIN
GOD KNOWS WHERE.

Though taking a somewhat circuitous route, the
letter went unerringly to its goal ; and it was not
long before the senders of that letter received the
laconic, but triumphant reply : " He did." They
now turned the tables on the jubilant author, who
equally as quickly received a letter addressed —

MARK TWAIN
THE DEVIL KNOWS WHERE.

It seemed that " he " did, too !

In his lifetime Mark Twain won a fame that was
literally world-wide — a fame, indeed, which seemed
to extend to realms peopled by noted theological
characters. From very humble beginnings — he
used facetiously to speak of coming up from the
" very dregs of society " ! — Mark Twain achieved

I 129

130 MARK TWAIN

international eminence and repute. This accomplish
ment was due to the power of brain and personality
alone. In this sense, his career is unprecedented
and unparalleled in the history of American literature.
._> It is a mark of the democratic independence of
America that she has betrayed a singular indifference
to the appraisal of her literature at the hands of
foreign criticism. Upon her writers who have ex
hibited derivative genius — Irving, Hawthorne,
Emerson, Longfellow — American criticism has
lavished the most extravagant eulogiums. The
three geniuses who have made permanent contribu
tions to world-literature, who have either embodied
in the completest degree the spirit of American
democracy, or who have had the widest following
of imitators and admirers in foreign countries, still
await their final and just deserts at the hands of
critical opinion in their own land. The genius of
Edgar Allan Poe gave rise to schools of literature
on the continent of Europe ; yet in America his
name must remain for years debarred from inclusion
in a so-called Hall of Fame ! Walt Whitman and
Mark Twain, the two great interpreters and em
bodiments of America, represent the supreme con
tribution of democracy to universal literature. In
so far as it is legitimate for anyone to be denominated

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 131

a " self-made man " in literature, these men are
justly entitled to such characterization. They owe
nothing to European literature — their genius is
supremely original, native, democratic. The case
of Mark Twain, which is our present concern, is a
literary phenomenon which imposes upon criticism,
peculiarly upon American criticism, the distinct
obligation of tracing the steps in his unhalting
climb to an eminence that was international in its
character, and of defining those signal qualities,
traits, characteristics — individual, literary, social,
racial, national — which compassed his world - wide
fame. For if it be true that the judgment of foreign
nations is virtually the judgment of posterity,
then is Mark Twain already a classic.

Upon the continent of Europe, Mark Twain first
received notable recognition in France at the hands
of that brilliant woman, Mme. Blanc (Th. Bentzon),
who devoted so much of her energies to the popular
ization of American literature in Europe. That one
of her series of essays upon the American humorists
which dealt with Mark Twain appeared in the
Revue des Deux Mondes in 1872 ; in it appeared
her admirable translation of The Jumping Frog.
There is no cause for surprise that a scholarly French
woman, reared on classic models and confined by

132 MARK TWAIN

rigid canons of art, should stand aghast at this
boisterous, barbaric, irreverent jester from the wilds
of America. When it is remembered that Mark
Twain began his career as one of the sage-brush
writers and gave free play to his passion for horse
play, his desire to " lay a mine " for the other fellow,
and his defiance of the traditional and the classic,
it is not to be wondered at that Mme. Blanc, while
honouring him with recognition in the most authori
tative literary journal in the world, could not conceal
an expression of amazement over his enthusiastic
acceptance in English-speaking countries.

" Mark Twain's Jumping Frog should be mentioned in the
first place as one of his most popular little stories — almost a
type of the rest. It is, nevertheless, rather difficult for us to
understand, while reading this story, the ' roars of laughter '
that it excited in Australia and in India, in New York and in
London ; the numerous editions of it which appeared ; the
epithet of ' inimitable ' that the critics of the English press
have unanimously awarded to it.

" We may remark that a Persian of Montesquieu, a Huron
of Voltaire, even a simple Peruvian woman of Madame de
Graffigny, reasons much more wisely about European civiliza
tion than an American of San Francisco. The fact is, that it
is not sufficient to have wit, or even natural taste, in order to
appreciate works of art.

"It is the right of humorists to be extravagant; but still
common sense, although carefully hidden, ought sometimes to
make itself apparent. ... In Mark Twain the Protestant is
enraged against the pagan worship of broken marble statues —

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 133

the democrat denies that there was any poetic feeling in the
middle ages. The sublime ruins of the Coliseum only impressed
him with the superiority of America, which punishes its criminals
by forcing them to work for the benefit of the State, over ancient
Rome, which could only draw from the punishments which it
inflicted the passing pleasure of a spectacle.

" In the course of this voyage in company with Mark Twain,
we at length discover, under his good-fellowship and apparent
ingenuousness, faults which we should never have expected.
He has in the highest degree that fault of appearing astonished
at nothing — common, we may say, to all savages. He confesses
himself that one of his great pleasures is to horrify the guides
by his indifference and stupidity. He is, too, decidedly envious.
. . . We could willingly pardon him his patriotic self-love, often
wounded by the ignorance of Europeans, above all in what
concerns the New World, if only that national pride were
without mixture of personal vanity ; but how comes it that
Mark Twain, so severe upon those poor Turks, finds scarcely
anything to criticize in Russia, where absolutism has neverthe
less not ceased to flourish ? We need not seek far for the
cause of this indulgence : the Czar received our ferocious
republicans ; the Empress, and the Grand Duchess Mary, spoke
to them in English.

" Taking the Pleasure Trip on the Continent altogether, does
it merit the success it enjoys ? In spite of the indulgence
that we cannot but show to the judgments of a foreigner;
while recollecting that those amongst us who have visited
America have fallen, doubtless, under the influence of prejudices
almost as dangerous as ignorance, into errors quite as bad — in
spite of the wit with which certain pages sparkle — we must
say that this voyage is very far below the less celebrated
excursions of the same author in his own country."

Three years later, Mme. Blanc returns to the

134 MARK TWAIN

discussion of Mark Twain, in an essay in the Revue
des Deux Mondes, entitled L'Age Dore en Amerique
—an elaborate review and analysis of The Gilded
Age. The savage charm and real simplicity of
Mark Twain are not lacking in appeal, even to her
sophisticated intelligence ; and she is inclined to
infer that jovial irony and animal spirits are qualities
sufficient to amuse a young nation of people like
the Americans who do not, like the French,
pique themselves upon being blase. According to
her judgment, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley
Warner are lacking in the requisite mental grasp
for the " stupendous task of interpreting the great
tableau of the American scene." Nor does she
regard their effort at collaboration as a success from
the standpoint of art. The charm of Colonel Sellers
wholly escapes her ; she cannot understand the
almost loving appreciation with which this cheaply
gross forerunner of the later American industrial
brigand was greeted by the American public. The
book repels her by " that mixture of good sense
with mad folly — disorder " ; but she praises Mark
Twain's accuracy as a reporter. The things which
offend her sensibilities are the wilful exaggeration of
the characters, and the jests which are so elaborately
constructed that " the very theme itself disappears

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 135

under the mass of embroidery which overlays it."
" The audacities of a Bret Harte, the grosser temeri
ties of a Mark Twain, still astonish us," she concludes ;
" but soon we shall become accustomed to an
American language whose savoury freshness is not
to be disdained, awaiting still more delicate and
refined qualities that time will doubtless bring."

In translating The Jumping Frog into faultless
French (giving Mark Twain the opportunity for
that delightful retranslation into English which
furnished delight for thousands), in reviewing with
elaboration and long citations The Innocents Abroad
and The Gilded Age, Mme. Blanc introduced Mark
Twain to the literary public of France ; and Emile
Blemont, in his Esquisses Americaines de Mark
Twain (1881), still further enhanced the fame of
Mark Twain in France by translating a number of
his slighter sketches. In 1886, Eugene Forgues
published in the Revue des Deux Mondes an ex
haustive review (with long citations) of Life on the
Mississippi, under the title Les Caravanes d'un
humoriste ; and his prefatory remarks in regard to
Mark Twain's fame in France at that time may be
accepted as authoritative. He pointed out the
praiseworthy efforts that had been made to popu
larize these " transatlantic gaieties," to import

136 MARK TWAIN

into France a new mode of comic entertainment.
Yet he felt that the peculiar twist of national char
acter, the type of wit peculiar to a people and a
country, the specialized conception of the vis comica
revealed in Mark Twain's works, confined them
to a restricted milieu. The result of all the efforts
to popularize Mark Twain in France, he makes
plain, was an almost complete check ; for to the
French taste Mark Twain's pleasantry appeared
macabre, his wit brutal, his temperament dry to
excess. By some, indeed, his exaggerations were
regarded as symptoms of mental alienation ; and
the originality of his verve did not succeed in giving
a passport to the incoherence of his conceptions.
" It has been said," remarked M. Forgues, with
keen perception, " that an academician slumbers
in the depths of every Frenchman ; and it was this
which prevented the success of Mark Twain in France.
Humour, in France, has its laws and its restrictions.
So the French public saw in Mark Twain a gross
jester, incessantly beating upon a tom-tom to
attract the attention of the crowd. They were
tenacious in resisting all such blandishments. . . .
As a humorist, Mark Twain was never appreciated
in France. The appreciation he ultimately secured
— an appreciation by no means inconsiderable,

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 137

though in no sense comparable to that won in Anglo-
Saxon and Germanic countries — was due to his
sagacity and penetration as an observer, and to his
marvellous faculty for calling up scenes and situations
by the clever use of the novel and the imprevu.
There was, even to the Frenchman, a certain lively
appeal in an intelligence absolutely free of convention,
sophistication, or reverence for traditionary views
qua traditionary." Though at first the salt of Mark
Twain's humour seemed to the French to be lacking
in the Attic flavour, this new mode of comic enter
tainment, the leisurely exposition of the genially
naive American, in time won its way with the blase
Parisians. Travellers who could find no copy of the
Bible in the street bookstalls of Paris, were con
fronted everywhere with copies of Roughing It.
When the authoritative edition of Mark Twain's
works appeared in English, that authoritative French
journal, the Mercure de France, paid him this dis
tinguished tribute : " His public is as varied as
possible, because of the versatility and suppleness
of his talent which addresses itself successively to
all classes of readers. He has been called the greatest
humorist in the world, and that is probably the
truth ; but he is also a charming and attractive
story-teller, an alert romancer, a clever and pene-

138 MARK TWAIN

trating observer, a philosopher without pretensions,
and therefore all the more profound, and finally, a
brilliant essayist."

Nevertheless, the observation of M. Forgues is
just and authentic — the Attic flavour of Vesprit
Gaulois is alien to the loosely articulated structure
of American humour. The noteworthy criticism
which Mark Twain directed at Paul Bourget's Outre
Mer, and the subsequent controversy incident thereto,
forced into light the racial and temperamental
dissimilarities between the Gallic and the American
Ausschauung. Mr. Clemens once remarked to me
that, of all continental peoples, the French were
most alien to the spirit of his humour. In Le Figaro,
at the time of Mark Twain's death, this fundamental
difference in taste once more comes to light : "It
is as difficult for a Frenchman to understand Mark
Twain as for a North American to admire La Fontaine.
At first sight, there is nothing in common between
that highly specialized faculty which the Anglo-
Saxons of the old and the new world designate under
the name of humour, and that quality with us which
we call wit (esprit}. And yet, at bottom, these two
manifestations of the human genius, so different
in appearance, have a common origin and reach the
same result : they are, both of them, the glorification

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 139

of good sense presented in pleasing and unexpected
form. Only, this form must necessarily vary with
peoples who do not speak the same language
and whose skulls are not fashioned in the same
way."

In Italy, as in France, the peculiar timbre of
Mark Twain's humour found an audience not wholly
sympathetic, not thoroughly au courant with his
spirit. " Translation, however accurate and con
scientious," as the Italian critic, Raffaele Simboli,
has pointed out, " fails to render the special flavour
of his work. And then in Italy, where humorous
writing generally either rests on a political basis
or depends on risky phrases, Mark Twain's sketches
are not appreciated because the spirit which breathes
in them is not always understood. The story of
The Jumping Frog, for instance, famous as it is in
America and England, has made little impression in
France or Italy."

It was rather among the Germanic peoples and
those most closely allied to them, the Scandinavians,
that Mark Twain found most complete and ready
response. At first blush, it seems almost incredible
that the writings of Mark Twain, with their occasional
slang, their colloquialisms and their local peculiarities
of dialect, should have borne translation so well into

140 MARK TWAIN

other languages, especially into German. It must,
however, be borne in mind that, despite these peculiar
features of his writings, they are couched in a
style of most marked directness, simplicity and
native English purity. The ease with which his
works were translated into foreign, especially the
Germanic and allied tongues, and the eager delight
with which they were read and comprehended by all
classes, high and low, constitute perhaps the most
signal conceivable tribute, not only to the humanity
of his spirit, but to the genuine art of his marvellously
forthright and natural style. It need be no cause
for surprise that as early as 1872 he had secured
Tauchnitz, of Leipzig, for his Continental agent.
German translations soon appeared of The Jumping
Frog and Other Stories (1874), The Gilded Age (1874),
The Innocents Abroad and The New Pilgrim's Pro
gress (1875), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).
A few years later his sketches, many of them, were
translated into virtually all printed languages,
notably into Russian and modern Greek ; and his
more extended works gradually came to be translated
into German, French. Italian, and the languages
of Denmark and the Scandinavian peninsula.

The elements of the colossally grotesque, the
wildly primitive, in Mark Twain's works, the under-

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 141

lying note of melancholy not less than the law
less Bohemianism, found sympathetic appreciation
among the Germanic races. George Meredith has
likened the functionings of Germanic humour to
the heavy-footed antics of a dancing bear. Mark
Twain's stories of the Argonauts, the miners and
desperadoes, with their primitive, orgiastic existence ;
his narratives of the wild freedom of the life on the
Mississippi, the lawless feuds and barbaric encounters
— all appealed to the passion for the fantastic and
the grotesque innate in the Germanic consciousness.
To the Europeans, this wild genius of the Pacific
Slope seemed to function in a sort of unexplored
fourth dimension of humour — vast and novel — of
which they had never dreamed. It is noteworthy
that Schleich, in his PsychopathiJc des Humors,
reserved for American humour, with Mark Twain
as its leading exponent, a distinct and unique cate
gory which he denominated phantasiischen, gross -
dimensionalen.

To the biographer belongs the task of describing,
in detail, the lavish entertainment and open-hearted
homage which were bestowed upon Mark Twain in
German Europe. In writing of Mark Twain and his
popularity in Germanic countries, Carl von Thaler
unhesitatingly asserts that Mark Twain was feted,

MARK TWAIN

wined and dined in Vienna, the Austrian metropolis,
in an unprecedented manner, and awarded unique
honours hitherto paid to no German writer. In Berlin,
the young Kaiser bestowed upon him the most
distinguished marks of his esteem ; and praised his
works, in especial Life on the Mississippi, with the
intensest enthusiasm. When Mark Twain received
a command from the Kaiser to dine with him, his
young daughter exclaimed that if it kept on like this,
there soon wouldn't be anybody left for him to
become acquainted with but God ! Mark said that
it seemed uncomplimentary to regard him as un
acquainted in that quarter ; but of course his daughter
was young, and the young always jump to conclu
sions without reflection. After hearing the Kaiser's
eulogy on Life on the Mississippi, he was astounded
and touched to receive a similar tribute, the same
evening, from the portier of his lodging-house. He
loved to dwell upon this, in later years — declaring
it the most extraordinary coincidence of his life that
a crowned head and a portier, the very top of an
empire and the very bottom of it, should have
expressed the very same criticism, and delivered the
very same verdict, upon one of his books, almost in
the same hour and the same breath.

The German edition of his works, in six volumes,

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 143

published by Lutz of Stuttgart, in 1898, I believe,
contained an introduction in which he was hailed
as the greatest humorist in the world. Among
German critics he was regarded as second only to
Dickens in drastic comic situation and depth of
feeling. Robinson Crusoe was held to exhibit a
limited power of imagination in comparison with
the ingenuity and inventiveness of Tom Sawyer. At
times the German critics confessed their inability
to discover the dividing line between astounding
actuality and fantastic exaggeration. The descrip
tions of the barbaric state of Western America
possessed an indescribable fascination for the sedate
Europeans. At times Mark Twain's bloody jests
froze the laughter on their lips ; and his " revolver-
humour " made their hair stand on end. Though
realizing that the scenes and events described in
Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Roughing It, and Life
on the Mississippi could not have been duplicated
in Europe, the German critics revelled in them none
the less that " such adventures were possible only
in America — perhaps only in the fancy of an
American ! " " Mark Twain's greatest strength,"
says Von Thaler, " lies in the little sketches, the
literary snap-shots. The shorter his work, the more
striking it is. He draws directly from life. No

144 MARK TWAIN

other writer has learned to know so many different
varieties of men and of circumstances, so many
strange examples of the Genus Homo, as he ; no
other has taken so strange a course of development."
The deeper elements of Mark Twain's humour did
not escape the attention of the Germans, nor fail
of appreciation at their hands. In his aphorisms,
embodying at once genuine wit and experience of
life, they discovered not merely the American
author, but the universal human being; these
aphorisms they found worthy of profound and
lasting admiration. Sintenis found in Mark Twain
a " living symptom of the youthful joy in existence "
— a genius capable at will, despite his " boyish
extravagance," of the virile formulation of fertile
and suggestive ideas. His latest critic in Germany
wrote at the time of his death, with a genuine in
sight into the significance of his work : " Although
Mark Twain's humour moves us to irresistible
laughter, this is not the main point in his books ;
like all true humorists, ist der Witz mit dem Welt-
schmerz verbunden, he is a witness to higher thoughts
and higher emotions, and his purpose is to expose
bad morals and evil circumstances, in order to im
prove and ennoble mankind." The critic of the
Berliner Zeitung asserted that Mark Twain is loved

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 145

in Germany more than all other humorists, English
or French, because his humour " turns fundamentally
upon serious and earnest conceptions of life." It
is a tremendously significant fact that the works of
American literature most widely read in Germany
are the works of — striking conjunction ! — Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Mark Twain.

The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County fired the
laugh heard round the world. Like Byron, Mark
Twain woke one morning to find himself famous.
A classic fable, which had once evoked inextinguish
able laughter in Athens, was unconsciously re-told
in the language of Angel's Camp, Calaveras County,
where history repeated itself with a precision of
detail startling in its miraculous coincidence. De
spite the international fame thus suddenly won by
this little fable, Mark Twain had yet to overcome
the ingrained opposition of insular prejudice before
his position in England and the colonies was
established upon a sure and enduring footing. In
a review of The Innocents Abroad in The Saturday
Review (1870), the comparison is made between the
Americans who " do Europe in six weeks " and the
most nearly analogous class of British travellers,
with the following interesting conclusions : " The
American is generally the noisier and more actively

146 MARK TWAIN

disagreeable, but, on the other hand, he often partially
redeems his absurdity by a certain nawete and half-
conscious humour. He is often laughing in his
sleeve at his own preposterous brags, and does not
take himself quite so seriously as his British rival.
He is vulgar, and even ostentatiously and atrociously
vulgar; but the vulgarity is mixed with a real
shrewdness which rescues it from simple insipidity.
We laugh at him, and we would rather not have too
much of his company ; but we do not feel altogether
safe in despising him." The lordly condescension
and gross self-satisfaction here betrayed are but
preliminaries to the ludicrous density of the sub
sequent reflections upon Mark Twain himself : " He
parades his utter ignorance of Continental languages
and manners, and expresses his very original judg
ments on various wonders of art and nature with a
praiseworthy frankness. We are sometimes left
in doubt whether he is speaking in all sincerity or
whether he is having a sly laugh at himself and his
readers " ! It is quite evident that the large mass
of English readers, represented by The Saturday
Review, had not caught Mark Twain's tone ; but
even the reviewer is more than half won over by
the infectiousness of this new American humour.
" Perhaps we have persuaded our readers by this

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 147

time that Mr. Twain (sic) is a very offensive specimen
of the vulgarest kind of Yankee. And yet, to say
the truth, we have a kind of liking for him. There
is a frankness and originality about his remarks
which is (sic) pleasanter than the mere repetition
of stale raptures ; and his fun, if not very refined,
is often tolerable in its way. In short, his pages
may be turned over with amusement, as exhibiting
more or less consciously a very lively portrait of the
uncultivated American tourist, who may be more
obtrusive and misjudging, but is not quite so stupidly
unobservant as our native product. We should
not choose either of them for our companions on
a visit to a church or a picture-gallery, but we should
expect most amusement from the Yankee as long
as we could stand him." It was this review which
gave Mark Twain the opening for his celebrated
parody — a parody which, I have always thought,
went far to opening the eyes of the British public
to the true spirit of his humour. Such irresistible
fun could not fail of appreciation at the hands of
a nation which regarded Dickens as their repre
sentative national author.

Two years later, Mark Twain received in England
an appreciative reception of wellnigh national
character. Whilst the literary and academic circles

148 MARK TWAIN

of America withheld their unstinted recognition of
an author so primitive and unlettered, Great Britain
received him with open arms. He was a welcome
guest at the houses of the exclusive ; the highest
dignitaries of public life, the authoritative journals,
the leaders of fashion, of thought, and of opinion
openly rejoiced in the breezy unconventionality,
the fascinating daring, and the genial personality
of this new variety of American genius. His English
publisher, John Camden Hotten, wrote in 1873 :
" How he dined with the Sheriff of London and
Middlesex ; how he spent glorious evenings with
the wits and literati who gather around the festive
boards of the Whitefriars and the Savage Clubs ;
how he moved in the gay throng at the Guildhall
conversazione ; how he feasted with the Lord
Mayor of London ; and was the guest of that ancient
and most honourable body — the City of London
Artillery — all these matters we should like to dwell
upon." His public lectures, though not so popular
as those of Artemus Ward, won him recognition as
a master in all the arts of the platform. Mr. H. R.
Haweis, who heard him once at the old Hanover
Square Rooms, thus describes the occasion : >c The
audience was not large nor very enthusiastic. I
believe he would have been an increasing success

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 149

had he stayed longer. We had not time to get
accustomed to his peculiar way, and there was
nothing to take us by storm, as in Artemus Ward.
.... He came on and stood quite alone. A little
table, with the traditional water-bottle and tumbler,
was by his side. His appearance was not impressive,
not very unlike the representation of him in the
various pictures in his Tramp Abroad. He spoke
more slowly than any other man I ever heard, and
did not look at his audience quite enough. I do
not think that he felt altogether at home with us,
nor we with him. We never laughed loud or long ;
no one went into those irrepressible convulsions
which used to make Artemus pause and look so
hurt and surprised. We sat throughout expectant
and on the qui vive, very well interested, and gently
simmering with amusement. With the exception
of one exquisite description of the old Magdalen
ivy -covered collegiate buildings at Oxford University,
I do not think there was one thing worth setting
down in print. I got no information out of the
lecture, and hardly a joke that would wear, or a
story that would bear repeating. There was a deal
about the dismal, lone silver-land, the story of the
Mexican plug that bucked, and a duel which never
came off, and another duel in which no one was

150 MARK TWAIN

injured ; and we sat patiently enough through it,
fancying that by and by the introduction would be
over, and the lecture would begin, when Twain sud
denly made his bow and went off ! It was over.
I looked at my watch ; I was never more taken
aback. I had been sitting there exactly an hour
and twenty minutes. It seemed ten minutes at the
outside. If you have ever tried to address a public
meeting, you will know what this means. It means
that Mark Twain is a consummate public speaker.
If ever he chose to say anything, he would say it
marvellously well ; but in the art of saying nothing
in an hour, he surpasses our most accomplished
parliamentary speakers."

The nation which had been reared upon the wit
of Sidney Smith, the irony of Swift, the gros sel
of Fielding, the extravagance of Dickens, was ripe
for the colossal incongruities and daring contrasts
of Mark Twain. They recognized in him not only
" the most successful and original wag of his day,"
but also a rare genius who shared with Walt Whitman
" the honour of being the most strictly American
writer of what is called American literature." We
read in a review of A Tramp Abroad, published in
The Athenceum in 1880 : " Mark Twain is American
pure and simple. To the eastern motherland he

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 151

owes but the rudiments, the groundwork, already
archaic and obsolete to him, of the speech he has to
write ; in his turn of art, his literary method and
aims, his intellectual habit and temper, he is as
distinctly national as the Fourth of July." Mark
Twain was admired because he was " a literary
artist of exceptional skill " ; and it was ungrudgingly
acknowledged that " he has a keen sense of character
and uncommon skill in presenting it dramatically ;
and he is also an admirable story-teller, with the
anecdotic instinct and habit in perfection, and with a
power of episodic narrative that is scarcely equalled,
if at all, by Mr. Charles Reade himself." Indeed,
from the early days of The Innocents Abroad, the
" first transatlantic democratic utterance which
found its way into the hearing of the mass of English
people " ; during the period of Tom Sawyer, " the
completest boy in fiction," the immortal Huckleberry
Finn, " the standard picaresque novel of America —
the least trammelled piece of literature in the
language," and Life on the Mississippi, vastly appreci
ated in England as in Germany for its cultur-historisch
value ; down to the day when Oxford University
bestowed the coveted honour of its degree upon
Mark Twain, and all England took him to their
hearts with fervour and abandon — during this long

152 MARK TWAIN

period of almost four decades, Mark Twain progress
ively strengthened his hold upon the imagination of
the English people and, like Charles Dickens before
him, may be said to have become the representative
author of the Anglo-Saxon race. " The vast majority
of readers here regard him," said Mr. Sydney Brooks
in 1907, " to a degree in which they regard no other
living writer, as their personal friend, and love him
for his tenderness, his masculinity, his unfailing
wholesomeness even more than for his humour."
To all who love and admire Mark Twain, these words
in which he was welcomed to England in 1907 should
stand as a symbol of that racial bond, that entente
cordiale of blood and heart, which he did so much
to strengthen and secure. " A compliment paid to
Mark Twain is something more than a compliment
to a great man, a great writer, and a great citizen.
It is a compliment to the American people, and one
that will come home to them with peculiar gratifica
tion. . . . The feeling for Mark Twain among his
own people is like that of the Scotch for Sir Walter
eighty odd years ago, or like that of our fathers for
Charles Dickens. There is admiration in it, gratitude,
pride, and, above all, an immense and intimate
tenderness of affection. To writers alone it is given
to win a sentiment of this quality — to writers and

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 153

occasionally, by the oddness of the human mind,
to generals. Perhaps one would best take the
measure of the American devotion to Mark Twain
by describing it as a compound of what Dickens
enjoyed in England forty years ago, and of what
Lord Roberts enjoys to-day, and by adding something
thereto for the intensity of all transatlantic emotions.
The ' popularity ' of statesmen, even of such a
statesman as President Roosevelt, is a poor and
flickering light by the side of this full flame of
personal affection. It has gone out to Mark Twain
not only for what he has written, for the clean,
irresistible extravagance of his humour and his
unfailing command of the primal feelings, for his
tenderness, his jollity, and his power to read the
heart of boy and man and woman ; not only for
the tragedies and afflictions of his life so unconquer
ably borne ; not only for his brave and fiery dashes
against tyranny, humbug, and corruption at home
and abroad ; but also because his countrymen feel
him to be, beyond all other men, the incarnation
of the American spirit."

Mark Twain achieved a position of supreme
eminence as a representative national author which
is without a parallel in the history of American
literature. This position he achieved directly by

154 MARK TWAIN

his appeal to the great mass of the people, despite
the dicta of the literati. At a time when England
and Europe were throwing wide the doors to Mark
Twain, the culture of his own land was regarding
him with slighting condescension, or with mildly
quizzical unconcern. Boston regarded him with
fastidious and frigid disapproval, Longfellow and
Lowell found little in him to admire or approve.
There were notable exceptions, as Mr. Ho wells has
recently pointed out — Charles Eliot Norton, Professor
Francis J. Child, and most notable of all, Mr. Howells
himself ; but in general it is true that " in pro
portion as people thought themselves refined they
questioned that quality which all recognize in
him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge
of the simple-hearted multitude." The professors
of literature regarded Mark Twain as an author
whose works were essentially ephemeral ; and stood
in the breach for Culture against the barbaric in
vasion of primitive Western Barbarism. Professor
W. P. Trent was, I believe, the first to cite Professor
Richardson's American Literature (published in 1886)
as a typical instance of the position of literary
culture in regard to Mark Twain. " But there is a
class of writers," we read in that work, " authors
ranking below Irving or Lowell, and lacking the

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 155

higher artistic or moral purpose of the greater
humorists, who amuse a generation and then pass
from sight. Every period demands a new manner
of jest, after the current fashion. . . . The reigning
favourites of the day are Frank R. Stockton, Joel
Chandler Harris, the various newspaper jokers,
and ' Mark Twain.' [Note the damning position /]
But the creators of ' Pomona ' and ' Rudder Grange,'
of 6 Uncle Remus and his Folk-lore Stories,' and
' Innocents Abroad,' clever as they are, must make
hay while the sun shines. Twenty years hence,
unless they chance to enshrine their wit in some
higher literary achievement, their unknown suc
cessors will be the privileged comedians of the
republic. Humour alone never gives its masters
a place in literature ; it must coexist with literary
qualities, and must usually be joined with such
pathos as one finds in Lamb, Hood, Irving, or
Holmes." This passage stands in the 1892 edition
of that work, though Tom Sawyer had appeared in
1876, The Prince and the Pauper in 1882, Life on
the Mississippi in 1883, Huckleberry Finn in 1884,
and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
in 1889. Opinions analogous to those expressed
in the passage just cited have found frequent ex
pression among leaders of critical opinion in America ;

MARK TWAIN

and only yesterday The Jumping Frog and The
Innocents Abroad were seriously put forward, by a
clever and popular American critic, as Mark Twain's
most enduring claims upon posterity ! A bare
half-dozen men in the ranks of American literary
criticism have recognized and eloquently spoken
forth in vindication of Mark Twain's title as a
classic author, not simply of American literature,
but of the literature of the world.

It is, even now, perhaps not too early to attempt
some sort of inquiry into the causes contributory
to Mark Twain's recognition as the prime repre
sentative of contemporary American literature. One
of the cheap catchwords of Mark Twain criticism
is the statement that he is " American to the core,"
and that his popular appreciation in his own country
was due to the fact that he most completely em
bodied the national genius. How many of those
who confidently advance this vastly significant
statement, one curiously wonders, have seriously
endeavoured to make plain to others — or even to
themselves — the reasons therefor ? Perhaps in
seeking the causes for Mark Twain's renown in his
own country one may discover the causes for his
world-wide fame.

A map of the United States, upon which were

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 157

marked the localities and regions made famous by
the writings of Mark Twain, would show that,
geographically, he has known and studied this vast
country in all the grand divisions of its composition.
Bred from old Southern stock, born in the South
west, he passed his youth upon the bosom of that
great natural division between East and West, the
Mississippi River, which cleaves in twain the very
body of the nation. In the twenties he lost the
feeling of local attachment in the vast democracy
of the West, and looked life — a strangely barbaric
and primitive life — straight in the face. This is
the first great transformation in his life — behold
the Westerner ! After enriching his mind through
contact with civilizations so diverse as Europe and
the Sandwich Islands, he settled down in Connecticut,
boldly foreswore the creeds and principles of his
native section, and underwent a new transformation
— behold the Yankee ! Once again, travel in foreign
lands, association with the most intellectual and
cultured circles of the world, broadened his vision ;
yet this cosmopolitan experience, far from diminish
ing his racial consciousness, tended still further to
accentuate the national characteristics. In this
new transformation, we behold the typical
American ! The later years, of cosmopolitan re-

158 MARK TWAIN

"—•— —.^

nown, of world-wide fame, throw into high relief
the last transformation — behold the universally
human spirit ! Under this crude catalogue, the
main lines of Mark Twain's development stand
out in sharp definition. The catalogue, however,
is only too crude — it is impossible to say with
precision just when such and such a transformation
actually took place. It is only intended to be
suggestive ; for we must bear in mind that Mark
Twain never changed character. His spirit under
went an evolutionary process — broadening, deepen
ing, enlarging its vision with the passage of the
years.

The part which the South played in the formation
of the character and genius of Mark Twain has been
little noted heretofore. It was in the South and
Southwest that the creator of the humour of local
eccentrics first appeared in full flower ; and " Ned
Brace," " Major Jones," and " Sut Lovengood "
have in them the germs of that later Western humour
that was to come to full fruition in the works of
Bret Harte and Mark Twain. The stage coach
and the river steamboat furnished the means for
disseminating far and wide the gross, the ghastly,
the extravagant stories, the oddities of speech, the
fantastic jests which emerged from the clash of

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 159

diverse and oddly -assorted types. The jarring
contrasts, the incongruities and surprises daily
furnished by the picturesque river life unquestion
ably stimulated and fertilized the latent germs of
humour in the young cub -pilot, Sam Clemens.
Through Mark Twain's greatest works flows the
stately Mississippi, magically imparting to them
some indefinable share of its beauty, its variety,
its majesty, its immensity ; and there is no exaggera
tion in the conclusion that it is the greatest natural
influence which his works betray. Reared in a
slave-holding community of narrow-visioned, arro
gantly provincial people of the lower middle class ;
seeing his own father so degrade himself as to cuff
his negro house-boy ; consorting with ragamuffins,
the rag-tag and bob-tail of the town, in his passion
for bohemianism and truantry — young Clemens
never learned to know the beauty and the dignity,
the purity and the humanity, of that aristocratic
patriarchal South which produced such beautiful
figures as Lee and Lanier. Not even his most
enthusiastic biographers have attempted to palliate,
save with half-hearted facetiousness, his inglorious
desertion of the cause which he had espoused. Mark
Twain is the most speedily " reconstructed rebel "
on record. Is it broad-minded — or even accurate !

160 MARK TWAIN

— for Mr. Ho wells to say of Mark Twain : " No one
has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand,
Walter-Scotticised, pseudo- chivalry of the Southern
ideal ? v Mark Twain never, I firmly believe,
held up to ridicule the Southern " ideal." But in
a well-known and excellent passage in Life on the
Mississippi, he properly pokes fun at the " wordy,
windy, flowery ' eloquence,' romanticism, senti
mentality — all imitated from Sir Walter Scott," of
the Southern literary journal of the thirties and
forties. In later years Mark Twain, in his Joan of
Arc, voiced a spirit of noble chivalry which bespoke
the " Southern ideal " of his Virginia forbears ;
and that delicacy of instinct in matters of right and
wrong which is so conspicuous a trait of Mark
Twain's is a symptom of that " moral elegance "
which Mr. Owen Wister has pronounced to be one
of the defining characteristics of the Southern
American. " No American of Northern birth or
breeding," Mr. Howells pertinently observes, " could
have imagined the spiritual struggle of Huck Finn
in deciding to help the negro Jim to his freedom,
even though he should be for ever despised as a
negro thief in his native town, and perhaps eternally
lost through the blackness of his sin. No Northerner
could have come so close to the heart of a Kentucky

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 161

feud, and revealed it so perfectly, with the whimsi
cality playing through its carnage, or could have
so brought us into the presence of the sardonic
comi-tragedy of the squalid little river town where
the store-keeping magnate shoots down his drunken
tormentor in the arms of the drunkard's daughter,
and then cows with bitter mockery the mob that
comes to lynch him."

The influence of the West upon the character
and genius of Mark Twain is momentous and un
mistakable. Mark Twain found room for develop
ment and expansion in the primitive freedom of
the West. It was here, I think, that there were
bred in him that breezy democracy of sentiment
and that hatred of sham and pretence which fill
his writings from beginning to end. In the West,
virgin yet recalcitrant, every man stood — or fell —
by force of his own exertions ; every man, without
fear or favour, struggled for fortune, for competence
— or for existence. It was a case of the survival
of the fittest. In face of bleak Nature — the burning
alkali desert, the obdurate soil, the rock-ribbed
mountains, — all men were free and equal, in a
camaraderie of personal effort. In this primitive
democracy, every man demanded for himself what
he saw others getting. The pretender, the hypocrite,

162 MARK TWAIN

the sham, the humbug soon went to the wall, exposed

in the nakedness of his own impotency. Humour

is a salutary aid in the struggle of the individual

with the contrasts of life ; indeed it may be said to

be born of the perception of those contrasts. In

a degree no whit inferior to the variegated river

life, the life of the West furnished contrasts and

incongruities innumerable — vaster perhaps, and more

significant. There was the incessant contrast of

civilization with barbarism, of the East with the

West ; and there was infinite play for the comic

expose of the credulous " tenderfoot " at the hands

of the pitiless cowboy. Roars of Gargantuan laughter

shook the skies as each new initiate unwittingly

succumbed to the demoniac wiles of his tormentors.

The West was one vast theatre for the practice

of the " practical joke." Behind everything,

menacing, foreboding, tragic, lay the stupendous

contrast between Man and Nature ; and though

the miner, the granger, the cowboy laughed defiantly

at civilization and at Nature, there crept into the

consciousness of each the conviction that, in the

long run, civilization must triumph, and that, in

order to win success, Nature must be conquered and

subdued. In such an environment, with its spirit of

primitive democracy, its atmosphere of wild and

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 163

ribald jest, its contempt for the impostor, its per
petually recurring incongruities, and behind all
the solemn, perhaps tragic, presence of inexorable
Nature — in such an environment were sharpened
and whetted in Mark Twain the sense of humour,
the spirit of real democracy bred of competitive
effort, and the hatred for pretence, sham, and
imposture.

It was not, I think, until Mark Twain went to
live in Connecticut and, as he expressed it, became
a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture
among the other rocks of New England, that he
developed complete confidence in himself and his
powers. That passion for successful self-expression,
which Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler has defined
as the main ambition of the American, became
the dominant motive of Mark Twain's life. Of his
experience as a steamboat pilot, Mark Twain has
said that in that brief, sharp schooling he got person
ally and familiarly acquainted with about all the
different types of human nature that are to be found
in fiction, biography or history. In the West he had
still further enriched his mind with an inexhaustible
store of first-hand knowledge of human nature.
In rotation he had been tramping jour printer,
river pilot, private secretary, miner, reporter,

164 MARK TWAIN

lecturer. He now turns to literature in real earnest,
and begins to display that vast store of knowledge
derived from actual contact with the infinitely
diversified realities of American life. Mark Twain
takes on more and more of the characteristics of the
Yankee — those characteristics which constitute the
basis of his success : inventiveness and ingenuity,
the practical efficiency, the shrewdness and the hard
common-sense. It is the last phase in the formation
of the national type.

It was, I venture to say, in some such way as
this that Mark Twain came to assume in the eyes
of his countrymen an embodiment of the national
spirit. He was the self-made man in the self-made
democracy. He was at once his own creation and
the creation of a democracy. There were humorists
in America before Mark Twain ; there are humorists
in America still. But Mark Twain succeeded not
merely in captivating the great mass of the people ;
he achieved the far more difficult and unique dis
tinction of convincing his countrymen of his essential
fellowship, his temperamental affinity, with them.
This miracle he wrought by the frankest and most
straightforward revelation of the actual experiences
in his own life and the lives of those he had known
with perfect intimacy. It is true that he wrote a

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 165

few books dealing with other times, other scenes,
than our own in the present and in America. But
I daresay that his popularity with the mass of his
countrymen would not have been in any degree
lessened had he never written these few books.
Indeed, it is hardly to be doubted that his books
were successful in the ratio of their autobiographic
nature. For the character he revealed in those
books of his which are essentially autobiographic,
is the character dear to the American heart ; and
the experiences, vicissitudes, and hardships, shot
through and irradiated with a high boisterousness
of humour, found a joyous sympathy in the minds
and hearts of men who had all " been there " them
selves. In Mark Twain the American people recog
nized at last the sturdy democrat, independent of
foreign criticism ; confident in the validity and
value of his own ideas and judgments ; believing
loyally in his country's institutions, and upholding
them fearlessly before the world ; fundamentally
serious and self-reliant, yet with a practicality
tempered by humane kindliness, warmth of heart,
and a strain of persistent idealism ; rude, boisterous,
even uncouth, yet withal softened by sympathy for
the under- dog, a boundless love for the weak, the
friendless, the oppressed ; lacking in profound

166 MARK TWAIN

intellectuality, yet supreme in the possession of the
simple and homely virtues — an upright and honour
able character, a good citizen, a man tenacious of
the sanctity of the domestic virtues. America has
produced finer and more exalted types — giants in
intellectuality, princes in refinement and delicacy
of spirit, savants in culture, classics in authorship.
An American type combining culture with pictur-
esqueness, refinement with patriotism, suavity with
self-reliance, desire it as we may, still awaits the
imprimatur of international recognition. America
has sufficient cause for gratification in the memory
of that quaint and sturdy figure so conspicuously
bearing the national stamp and superscription.
Perhaps no American has equalled Mark Twain in
the quality of subsuming and embodying in his own
character so many elements of the national spirit
and genius. In letters, in life, Mark Twain is the
American par excellence.

Underneath those qualities which combined to
produce in Mark Twain a composite American type,
lay something deeper still — that indefinable je ne
sals quoi which procured him international fame.
Humour alone is utterly inadequate for achieving
so momentous a result — though humour ostensibly
constituted the burden of the appeal. As a matter

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 167

of fact, vehemently as the professors may deny it,
Mark Twain was an artist of remarkable force and
power. From the days when he came under the
tutelage of Mr. Howells, and humbly learned to
prune away his stylistic superfluities of the grosser
sort, Mark Twain indubitably began to subject
himself to the discipline of stern self-criticism.
While it is true that he never learned to realize in
full measure, to use Pater's phrase, " the responsi
bility of the artist to his materials," he assuredly
disciplined himself to make the most, in his own
way, of the rude and volcanic power which he pos
sessed. It is fortunate that Mark Twain never
subjected himself to the refinements of academic
culture ; a Harvard might well have spoiled a great
author. For Mark Twain had a memorable tale to
tell of rude, primitive men and barbaric, remote
scenes and circumstances ; of truant and resourceful
boyhood exercising all its cunning in circumventing
circumstance and mastering a calling. And he had
that tale to tell in the unlettered, yet vastly ex
pressive, phraseology of the actors in those wild
events. The secret of his style is directness of
thought, a sort of shattering clarity of utterance,
and a mastery of vital, vigorous, audacious individual
expression. He had a remarkable feeling for words

168 MARK TWAIN

and their uses ; and his language is the unspoiled,
expressive language of the people. At times he is
primitive and coarse ; but it is a Falstaffian note, the
mark of universality rather than of limitation. His
art was, in Tolstoy's phrase," the art of a people —
universal art " ; and his style was rich in the locutions
of the common people, rich and racy of the soil. A
signal merit of his style is its admirable adaptation to
the theme. The personages of his novels always
speak " in character " —with perfect reproduction,
not only of their natural speech, but also of their
natural thoughts. Though Mr. Henry James may
have said that one must be a very rudimentary person
to enjoy Mark Twain, there is unimpeachable virtue
in a rudimentary style in treatment of rudimentary
or, — as I should prefer to phrase it, — fundamental
things. Mr. James, I feel sure, could never have put
into the mouth of a " rudimentary " person like
Huck, so vivid and graphic a description of a storm
with its perfect reproduction of the impression
caught by the " rudimentary " mind. " Writers
of fiction," says Sir Walter Besant in speaking of this
book, " will understand the difficulty of getting inside
the brain of that boy, seeing things as he saw them,
writing as he would have written, and acting as
he would have acted ; and presenting to the world

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 169

true, faithful, and living effigies of that boy. The
feat has been accomplished ; there is no character in
fiction more fully, more faithfully, presented than
the character of Huckleberry Finn. ... It may be
objected that the characters are extravagant. Not
so. They are all exactly and literally true ; they
are quite possible in a country so remote and so
primitive. Every figure in the book is a type;
Huckleberry Finn has exaggerated none. We see
the life — the dull and vacuous life — of a small
township upon the Mississippi River forty years ago.
So far as I know, it is the only place where we can
find that phase of life portrayed."

Mark Twain impressed one always as writing
with utter individuality — untrammelled by the
limitations of any particular sect of art. In his
books of travel, he reveals not only the instinct of
the trained journalist for the novel and the effective,
but also the feeling of the artist for the beautiful,
the impressive, and the sublime. His descriptions,
of striking natural objects, such as the volcano of
Mount Kilauea in the Sandwich Islands, of memor
able architecture, such as the cathedral at Milan,
show that he possessed the " stereoscopic imagina
tion " in rare degree. The picture he evokes of
Athens by moonlight, in the language of sim-

170 MARK TWAIN

plicity and restraint, ineffaceably fixes itself in the
fancy.

Mark Twain was regarded in France as a remark
able "impressionist" and praised by the critics
for the realistic accuracy and minuteness of his
delineation. Kipling frankly acknowledged the great
debt that he owed him. Tennyson spoke in high
praise of his finesse in the choice of words, his
feeling for the just word to catch and, as it were,
visualize the precise shade of meaning desired. In
truth, Mark Twain was an impressionist, rather than
an imaginative artist. That passage in A Yankee in
King Arthur's Court in which he describes an early
morning ride through the forest, pictorially evocative
as it is, stands self-revealed — a confusedly imagina
tive effort to create an image he has never experienced.

If we set over beside this the remarkable de
scriptions of things seen, as minutely evocative as
instantaneous photographs — such, for example, as
the picture of a summer storm, or preferably, the
picture of dawn on the Mississippi, both from
Huckleberry Finn — pictures Mark Twain had seen
and lived hundreds of times, we see at once the
striking superiority of the realistic impressionist
over the imaginative artist.

I have always felt that the most lasting influence

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 171

of his life — the influence which has left the most
pervasive impression upon his art and thought —
is portrayed in that classic and memorable passage
in which he portrays the marvellous spell laid upon
him by that mistress of his youth, the great river.

To the young pilot, the face of the water in time
became a wonderful book. For the uninitiated
traveller it was a dead language, but to the young
pilot it gave up its most cherished secrets. He came
to feel that there had never been so wonderful a
book written by man. To its haunting beauty, its
enfolding mystery, he yielded himself unreservedly —
drinking it in like one bewitched. But a day came
when he began to cease from noting its marvels.
Another day came when he ceased altogether to note
them.

In time, he came to realize that, for him, the
romance and the beauty were gone forever from
the river. If the early rapture was gone, in its place
was the deeper sense of knowledge and intimacy.
He had learned the ultimate secrets of the river —
learned them with a knowledge, so searching and so
profound, that he was enabled to give them the
enduring investiture of art.

Mark Twain possessed the gift of innate eloquence.
He was a master of the art of moving, touching,

172 MARK TWAIN

swaying an audience. At times, his insight into
the mysterious springs of humour, of passion, and
of pathos seemed almost like divination. All these
qualities appeared in full flower in the written
expression of his art. It would be doing a disservice
to his memory to deny that his style did not possess
literary distinction or elegance. At times his judg
ment was at fault ; his constitutional humour came
near playing havoc with his artistic sense. Not
seldom he was long-winded and laborious in his
striving after comic effect. To offset these manifest
lapses and defects there are the many fine qualities
— descriptive passages aglow with serene and cloud
less beauty, dramatic scenes depicted with virile
and rugged eloquence, pathetic incidents touched
with gentle and caressing tenderness.

Style bears translation ill ; in fact, translation
is not infrequently impossible. But Mr. Clemens
once pointed out to me that humour has nothing to
do with style. Mark Twain's humour — for humour
is his prevalent mood — has international range since,
constructed out of a deep comprehension of human
nature and a profound sympathy for human relation
ship and human failing, it successfully surmounts the
difficulties of translation into alien tongues.

Mark Twain became a great international figure,

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 173

not because he was an American, paradoxical and
unpatriotic as that may sound, but because he was
America's greatest cosmopolitan. He was a true
cosmopolitan in the Higginsonian sense, in that,
unlike Mr. Henry James, he was " at home even in
his own country." He was a true cosmopolitan
in the Tolstoy an sense ; for his was " art trans
mitting the simplest feelings of common life, but
such, always, as are accessible to all men in the
whole world — the art of common life — the art of a
people — universal art." His spirit grasped the true
ideal of our time and reflected it.

Mr. Clemens attributed his international success
not to qualities of style, not to allegiance to any
distinctive school, not to any overtopping eminence
of intellect. " Many so-called American humorists,"
he once remarked to me, " have been betrayed by
their preoccupation with the local. Their work
never crossed frontiers because they failed to
impart to their humour that universal element
which appeals to all races of men. Realism is
nothing more than close observation. But observa
tion will never give you the inside of the thing. The
life, the genius, the soul of a people are realized only
through years of absorption." Mr. Clemens assever
ated that the only way to be a great American

174 MARK TWAIN

humorist was to be a great human humorist — to
discover in Americans those permanent and universal
traits common to all nationalities. In his com
mentary upon Bourget's Outre Mer, he declared that
there wasn't a single human characteristic that could
safely be labelled " American " —not a single human
detail, inside or outside. Through years of automatic
observation, Mark Twain learned to discover for
America, to adapt his own phrase, those few
human peculiarities that can be generalized and
located here and there in the world and named by the
name of the nation where they are found.

Above all, I think, Mark Twain sympathized
with and found something to admire in the citizens
of every nation, seeking beneath the surface veneer
the universal traits of that nation's humanity. He
expressly disclaimed in my presence any " attitude "
toward the world, for the very simple reason that his
relation toward all peoples had been one of effort
at comprehension of their ideals, and identification
with them in feeling. He disavowed any colour
prejudices, caste prejudices, or creed prejudices —
maintaining that he could stand any society. All
that he cared to know was that a man was a human
being — that was bad enough for him ! It is a matter
not of argument, but of fact, that Mark Twain has

THE WORLD-FAMED GENIUS 175

made more damaging admissions concerning America
than concerning any other nation. Lafcadio Hearn
best succeeded in interpreting poetry to his Japanese
students by freeing it from all artificial and local
restraints, and using as examples the simplest lyrics
which go straight to the heart and soul of man.
His remarkable lecture on Naked Poetry is the
most signal illustration of his profoundly suggestive
mode of interpretation. In the same way, Mark
Twain as humorist has sought the highest common
factor of all nations. " My secret — if there is any
secret — ," Mr. Clemens once said to me, "is to
create humour independent of local conditions.
In studying humanity as exhibited in the people
and localities I best knew and understood, I have
sought to winnow out the encumbrance of the local."
And he significantly added — musingly — " Humour,
like morality, has its eternal verities"

To the literature of the world, I venture to say,
Mark Twain has contributed : his masterpiece, that
provincial Odyssey of the Mississippi, Huckleberry
Finn, a picaresque romance worthy to rank with
the very best examples of picaresque fiction ;
Tom Sawyer, only little inferior to its pendent story,
which might well be regarded as the supreme
American morality-play of youth, Everyboy ; The

176 MARK TWAIN

Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, an ironic fable of
such originality and dexterous creation that it
has no satisfactory parallel in literature ; the
first half of Life on the Mississippi and all of
Roughing It, for their reflections of the sociological
phases of a civilization now vanished forever. It is
gratifying to Americans to recognize in Mark Twain
the incarnation of democratic America. It is grati
fying to citizens of all nationalities to recall and re
capture the pleasure and delight his works have
given them for decades. It is more gratifying still
to rest confident in the belief that, in Mark Twain,
America has contributed to the world a genius sealed
of the tribe of Moliere, a congener of Le Sage, of
Fielding, of Defoe — a man who will be remembered,
as Mr. Ho wells has said, " with the great humorists
of all time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any
others worthy his company ; none of them was
his equal in humanity."

V. PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST

M

"Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward
towards a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure
in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer
benefits upon your neighbour and the community."

MARK TWAIN : What is Man ?

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST

" THE humorous writer," says Thackeray, " professes
to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your
kindness, your scorn for untruth, pretension, and
imposture, your tenderness for the weak, the poor,
the oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his
means and ability he comments on all the ordinary
actions and passions of life almost. He takes upon
himself to be the weejk^day^preacher, so to speak.
Accordingly, as he finds, and speaks, and feels the
truth best, we regard him, esteem him — sometimes
love him." This definition is apt enough to have
been made with Mark Twain in mind. In an earlier
chapter, is displayed the comic phase of Mark Twain's
humour. Beneath that humour, underlying it and
informing it, is a fund of human concern, a wealth
of seriousness and pathos, and a universality of
interests which argue real power and greatness.
These qualities, now to be discussed, reveal Mark
Twain as serious enough to be regarded as a real
moralist and philosopher, humane enough to be

179

180 MARK TWAIN

regarded as, in spirit, a true sociologist and
reformer.

It must be recognised that the history of literature
furnishes forth no great international figure, whose
fame rests solely upon the basis of humour, however
human, however sympathetic, however universal
that humour may be. Behind that humour must
lurk some deeper and more serious implication
which gives breadth and solidity to the art-product.
Genuine humour, as Landor has pointed out, re
quires a " sound and capacious mind, which is
always a grave one." There is always a breadth of
philosophy, a depth of sadness, or a profundity of
pathos in the very greatest humorists. Both
Rabelais and La Fontaine were reflective dreamers ;
Cervantes fought for the progressive and the real
in pricking the bubble of Spanish chivalry ; and
Moliere declared that, for a man in his position, he
could do no better than attack the vices of his time
with ridiculous likenesses. Though exhibiting little
of the melancholy of Lincoln, Mark Twain revelled
in the same directness of thought and expression,
showed the same zest for broad humour reeking with
the strong but pungent flavour of the soil. Though
expressing distaste for Franklin's somewhat cold and
almost mercenary injunctions, Mark Twain never-

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST 181

theless has much of his Yankee thrift, shrewdness,
and bed-rock common sense. Beneath and com
mingled with all his boyish and exuberant fun is a
note of pathos subdued but unmistakable, which
rings true beside the forced and extravagant pathos
of Dickens. His Southern hereditament of chivalry,
his compassion for the oppressed and his defence
of the down-trodden, were never in abeyance from
the beginning of his career to the very end. jLike_
Joel Chandler Harris, that genial master of African —
folk-lore, Mark Twain found no theme of such ^

absorbing interest as human nature. Like Fielding,
he wrote immortal narratives in which the prime
concern is not the " story," but the almost scientific
revelation of the natural history of the characters.
The corrosive and mordant irony of many a passage in
r Mark Twain, wherein he holds up to scorn the fraudu- JNr^^-^"
lent and the artificial, the humbug, the hypocrite,
thersetisualist, are not unworthy of the colossal Swift.
That "disposition for hard hitting with a moral
purpose to sanction it," which George Meredith pro
nounces the national disposition of British humour,
is Mark Twain's unmistakable hereditament. It is,
perhaps, because he relates us to our origins, as Mr.
Brander Matthews has suggested, that Mark Twain
is the foremost of American humorists.

MARK TWAIN

In the preface to the Jumping Frog, published as
far back as 1867, Mark Twain was dubbed, not
only " the wild humorist of the Pacific slope," but also
" the moralist of the Main." The first book which
brought him great popularity, The Innocents Abroad,
exhibited qualities of serious ethical import which,
while escaping the attention of the readers of that
day, emerge for the moderns from the welter of
hilarious humour. How unforgettable is his righteous
indignation over that " benefit " performance he
witnessed in Italy !

The ingrained quality in Mark Twain, which
perhaps more than any other won the enthusiastic
admiration of his fellow Americans, was this : he
always had the courage of his convictions. He
writes of things, classic and hallowed by centuries,
with a freshness of viewpoint, a total indifference
to crystallized opinion, that inspire tremendous
respect for his courage, even when one's own con
victions are not engaged. The ;c beautiful love
story of Abelard and Heloise " will never, I venture
to say, recover its pristine glory — now that Mark
Twain has poured over Abelard the vials of his wrath.

Those who know only the Mark Twain of the
latter years, with his deep, underlying seriousness,
his grim irony, and his passion for justice and

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST 183

truth, find difficulty in realizing that, in his earlier
days, the joker and the buffoon were almost solely
in evidence. In answer to a query of mine as to
the reason for the serious spirit that crept into and
gave carrying power to his humour, Mr. Clemens
frankly replied : "I never wrote a serious word
until after I married Mrs. Clemens. She is solely
responsible — to her shoulo! goTEKe credit — for any
deeply serious or moral influence my subsequent
work may exert. After my marriage, she edited
everything I wrote. And what is more— she not
only edited my works, she edited me ! After I
had written some side-splitting story, something
beginning seriously and ending in preposterous
anti- climax, she would say to me : ' You have
a true lesson, a serious meaning ta impart here.
Don't give way to your invincible temptation
to destroy the good effect of your story by
some extravagantly comic absurdity. Be yourself !
Speak out your real thoughts as humorously as
you please, but — without farcical commentary.
Don't-destroy your purpose with an ill-timed joke.'
|l learned from her that the only right thing was to
get in my serious meaning always, to treat my
audience fairly, to let them really feel the underlying
moral that gave body and essence to my jest."

184 MARK TWAIN

The quality with which Mark Twain invests his
disquisitions upon morals, upon conscience, upon
human foibles and failings, is the charm of the
humorist always — never the grimness of the. moralist
or the coldness of the philosopher. He observes
all human traits, whether of moral sophistry or
ethical casuistry, with the genial sympathy of a
lover of his kind irradiated with the riant com
prehension of the humorist. And yet at times there
creeps into his tone a note of sincere and manly
pathos, unmistakable, irresistible. One has only
to read the beautiful, tender tale of the blue jay in
A Tramp Abroad to know the beauty and the depth
of his feeling for nature and her creatures, his sense
of kinship with his brothers of the animal kingdom.

In our first joyous and headlong interest in the
narrative of Huckleberry Finn, its rapid succession
of continuously arresting incidents, its omnipresent
yet never intrusive humour, the deeper significance
of many a passage in that contemporary classic
is likely to escape notice. Sir Walter Besant, who
revelled in it as one of the most completely satisfying
and delightful of books, speaks of it deliberately
as a book without a moral. Perhaps he was deceived
by the foreword : " Persons attempting to find a
motive in this narrative will be prosecuted ; persons

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST 185

attempting to find a moral in it will be banished ;
persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."
There never was a more easy-going, care-free, un-
puritanical lot than Huck and Jim, the two farcical
" hoboes," Tom Sawyer, and the rest. And yet in
the light of Mark Twain's later writings one cannot
but see in that picaresque romance, with its pleasingly
loose moral atmosphere, an underlying seriousness
and conviction. Jim is a simple, harmless negro,
childlike and primitive ; yet, so marvellous, so re
strained is the art of the narrator, that imperceptibly,
unconsciously, one comes to feel not only a deep in
terest in, but a genuine respect for, this innocent
fugitive from slavery. Mr. Booker Washington,
a distinguished representative of his race, said he
could not help feeling that, in the character of Jim,
Mark Twain had, perhaps unconsciously, exhibited
his sympathy for and interest in the masses of the
negro people.

Indeed, to the reflective mind — and it is to be
presumed that by that standard Mark Twain's
works will ultimately be judged — there is no more
significant passage t&JIuckleberry Finn than that in
which Huck struggles with his conscience over the
knotty problem of his moral responsibility for com
passing Jim's emancipation. Nothing else is needed

186 MARK TWAIN

to show at once Mark Twain's preoccupation with
the workings of human conscience in the unso
phisticated mind and his conviction that, with the
"lights that he had," Huck was justified in his
courageous decision.

Huck felt deeply repentant for allowing Jim to
escape from the innocent, inoffending Miss Watson.
He became consumed with horror and remorse to
hear Jim making plans for stealing his wife and
children, if their masters wouldn't sell them. His
conscience kept stirring him up hotter than ever
when he heard Jim talking to himself about the
joys of freedom. After awhile, Huck decided to
write a letter to Miss Watson, informing her of
the whereabouts of her " runaway nigger." After
writing that letter, he felt washed clean of sin,
uplifted, exalted. But he could not forget all the
goodness and tenderness of poor Jim, who had shown
himself so profoundly grateful. Though he faced
the torments of Puritanical damnation as a con
sequence, he resolved to let Jim go free. Humanity
triumphed over conscience — and with an " All
right, then, I'll go to hell," he tore up the letter...

One of Mark Twain's favourite themes for the
display of his humour was the subject of prevarica
tion. He seemed never to tire of ringing the changes

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST 187

upon the theme of the lie, its utility, its convenience,
and its consequences. Doubtless he chose to dabble
in falsehood because it is generally winked at as the
most venial of all moral obliquities — a fault which
is the most thoroughly universal of all that flesh
is heir to. The incident of George Washington
and the cherry tree furnished the basis for countless
of his anecdotes ; he wrung from it variations in
numerable, from the epigram to the anecdote. His
distinction between George Washington and himself,
redounding immeasurably to his own glory, and
demonstrating his complete superiority to Washington
as a moral character, is classic : " George Washington
couldn't tell a lie. I can ; but I won't." Perhaps
his most humorous anecdote, based upon the same
story, is in connection with the exceedingly old
" darky " he once met in the South, who claimed
to have crossed the Delaware with Washington.
" Were you with Washington," asked Mark Twain
mischievously, " when he took that hack at the
cherry tree ? '' This was a poser for the old darkey ;
his pride was appealed to, his very character was at
stake. After an awkward hesitation, the old darkey
spoke up, a gleam of simulated recollection (and real
gratification for his convenient memory) overspread
ing his countenance : " Lord, boss, I was dar. In

188 MARK TWAIN

cose I was. I was with Marse George at dat very
time. In fac — I done druv dat hack myself " !

Mark Twain's most delightful trick as a popular
humorist was to strike out some comic epigram,
that passed currency with the masses whose fancy
it tickled, and also had upon it the minted stamp
of the classic aphorism. These epigrams were
frequently pseudo-moral in their nature ; and their
humour usually lay in the assumption that every
body is habitually addicted to prevarication —
which is just precisely true enough and reprehensible
enough to validate the epigram. His method was
humorous inversion ; and he told a story whose
morals are so ludicrously twisted that the right
moral, by contrast, spontaneously springs to light.
" Never tell a lie — except for practice," is less
successful than the more popularly known " When
in doubt, tell the truth." Out of the latter maxim
he succeeded in extracting a further essence of
humour. He admitted inventing the maxim, but
never expected it to be applied to himself. His
advice, he said, was intended for other people ; when
he was in doubt himself, he used more sagacity !
Mark Twain has made no more delightful epigram
than that one in which he recognizes that a lie,
morally reprehensible as it may be, is undoubtedly an

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST 189

ever present help in time of need : " Never waste a
lie. You never know when you may need it."

Sometimes in a humorous, sometimes in a grimly
serious way, Mark Twain was fond of drawing the
distinction between theoretical and practical morals.
Theoretical morals, he would point out, are the sort
you get on your mother's knee, in good books, and
from the pulpit. You get them into your head, not
into your heart. Only by the commission of crime
can anyone acquire real morals. Commit all the
crimes in the decalogue, take them in rotation, per
severe in this stern determination — and after awhile
you will thereby attain to moral perfection ! It is
not enough to commit just one crime or two — though
every little bit helps. Only by committing them
all can you achieve real morality ! It is interesting
to note this distinction between Mark Twain, the
humorous moralist, and Bernard Shaw, the ethical
thinker. Each teaches precisely the same thing — the
one not even half seriously, the other with all the
sharp sincerity of conviction. Shaw unhesitatingly
declares that trying to be wicked is precisely the
same experiment as trying to be good, viz., the
discovery of character.

The range of Mark Twain's humour, from the
ludicrous anecdote with comically mixed morals to

190 MARK TWAIN

the profound parable with grimly ironic conclusion,
takes the measure of the ethical nature of the man.
It can best be illustrated, I think, by a comparison
of his anecdote of the theft of the green water-melon
and the classic fable of The Man that Corrupted
Hadleyburg. Mark stole a water-melon out of a
farmer's wagon, while he wasn't looking. Of course
stole was too harsh a term — he withdrew, he retired
that water-melon. After getting safely away to a
secluded spot, he broke the water-melon open — only
to find that it was green, the greenest water-melon
of the year.

The moment he saw that the water-melon was
green, he felt sorry. He began to reflect — for re
flection is the beginning of reform. It is only by
reflecting on some crime you have committed, that
you are " vaccinated " against committing it again.

So Mark began to reflect. And his reflections were
of this nature : What ought a boy to do who has
stolen a green water-melon ? What would George
Washington, who never told a lie, have done ? He
decided that the only real, right thing for any boy
to do, who has stolen a water-melon of that class,
is to make restitution. It is his duty to restore it
to its rightful owner. So rising up, spiritually
strengthened and refreshed by his noble resolution,

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST 191

Mark restored the water-melon — what there was left
of it — to the farmer and — made the farmer give him a
ripe one in its place ! Thus he clinched the " moral "
of this story, so quaint and so ingenious ; and con
cluded that only in some such way as this could one
be fortified against further commission of crime.
Only thus could one become morally perfect !

Here, as in countless other places, Mark Twain
throws over his ethical suggestion — a suggestion, by
contrast, of the very converse of his literal words —
the veil of paradox and exaggeration, of incongruity,
fantasy, light irony. Yet beneath this outer covering
of art there is a serious meaning that, like murder,
will out. If demonstration were needed that Mark
Twain is sealed of the tribe of moralists, that is
amply supplied by that masterpiece, that triumph
of invention, construction, and originality,
Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg. Here is a pure
morality, daring in the extreme and incredibly
original in a world perpetually reiterating a saying
already thousands of years old, to the effect that
there is nothing new under the sun. It is a deliberate
emendation of that invocation in the Lord's Prayer :
" Lead us (not) into temptation." The shrieking
irony of this trenchant parable, its cynicism and
heartlessness, would make of it an unendurable

192 MARK TWAIN

(Criticism of human life — were it accepted literally
as a representation of society. In essence it is a
morality pure and simple, animated not only by its
brilliantly original ethical suggestion, but also by its
illuminating reflection of human nature and its
graciously relieving humour. In that exultant letter
which the Diabolus ex machina wrote to the betrayed
villagers, he sneers at their old and lofty reputation
for honesty — that reputation of which they were
so inordinately proud and vain. The weak point in
their armour was disclosed so soon as he discovered
how carefully and vigilantly they kept themselves and
their children out of temptation. For he well knew
that the weakest of all weak things is a virtue that has
not been tested in the fire. The familiar distinction
between innocence and virtue springs to mind.
And it is worthy of consideration that Nietzsche,
and Shaw after him, both point out that virtue
consists, not in resisting evil, but in not desiring it !
The Man thai Corrupted Hadleyburg is a masterpiece,
\J eminently worthy of the genius of a Swift. It gro-
claims Mark Twain not only as a supreme axtist,
but also as eminently and distinctively a moralist.

It is impossible to think of Mark Twain in his
maturer development as other than a moralist. My
personal acquaintance with Mr. Clemens convinced

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST 193

me — had I needed to be convinced — that in his
later years he had striven to grapple nobly with
many of the deeper issues of life, character and
morality, public, religious and social, as well as
personal and private. I never knew anyone who
thought so " straight," or who expressed himself
with such simple directness upon questions affecting
religion and conduct. He was absolutely fearless in
his condemnation of those subsidized " ministers "
of the Gospel in cosmopolitan centres, who, through
self-interest, cut their moral disquisitions to fit
the predilections of their wealthy parishioners, many
of whom were under national condemnation as
" malefactors of great wealth." Animated by love
for all creatures, the defenceless wild animal as well
as the domestic pet, he was unsparing in his indict
ment of those big-game hunters who shamelessly
described their feelings of savage exultation when
some poor animal served as the target for their skill,
and staggered off wounded unto death. His sympathy
for the natives of the Congo was profound and
intense ; and his philippic against King Leopold
for the atrocities he sanctioned called the attention
of the whole world to conditions that constituted
a disgrace to modern civilization. His diatribe
against the Czar of Russia for his inhumanity to the

N

194 MARK TWAIN

serfs was an equally convincing proof of his noble
determination to throw the whole weight of his in
fluence in behalf of suffering and oppressed humanity.
Some years before his death, he told me that he
never intended to speak in public again save in
behalf of movements, humanitarian and uplifting,
which gave promise of effecting civic betterment
and social improvement.

I have always felt a peculiar and personal debt
of gratitude to Mark Twain for three events — for
the publication of such works can be dignified
with no less eminent characterization. When Mr.
Edward Dowden tried to make out the best case
for Shelley that he could, it was at the sacrifice of the
reputation of the defenceless Harriet Westbrook.
That ingrained chivalry which is the defining char
acteristic of the Southerner, the sympathy for the
oppressed, the compassion for the weak and the
defenceless, animated Mark Twain to one of the
noblest actions of his career. For his defence of
Harriet Westbrook is something more than a work,
it is an act — an act of high courage and nobility.
With words icily cold in their logic, Mark Twain
tabulated the six pitifully insignificant charges
against Harriet, such as her love for dress and her
waning interest in Latin lessons, and set over against

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST 195

them the six times repeated name of Cornelia Turner,
that fascinating young married woman who read
Petrarch with Shelley and sat up all hours of the
night with him — because he saw visions when he
was alone ! Again, in his Joan of Arc, Mark Twain
erected a monument of enduring beauty to that
simple maid of Orleans, to whom the Roman Catholic
Church has just now paid the merited yet tardy
tribute of canonization. It is a sad commentary
upon the popular attitude of frivolity towards the
professional humorist that Mark Twain felt com
pelled to publish this book anonymously, in order
that the truth and beauty of that magic story might \
receive its just meed of respectful and sympathetic
attention.

The third act for which I have always felt deeply
grateful to Mark Twain is the apparently little known,
yet beautiful and significant story entitled Was it
Heaven or Hell ? It contains, I believe, the moral
that had most meaning for Mark Twain throughout
his entire life — the bankruptcy of rigidly formal
Puritanism in the face of erring human nature, the
tragic result of heedlessly holding to the letter,
instead of wisely conforming to the spirit, of
moral law. No one doubts that Mark Twain — as
who would not ? — believed, aye, knew, that this

196 MARK TWAIN

sweet, human child went to a heaven of forgiveness
and mercy, not to a hell of fire and brimstone, for
her innocently trivial transgression. The essay
on Harriet Shelley, the novel of Joan of Arc, and
the story Was it Heaven or Hell ? are all, as decisively
as the philippic against King Leopold, the diatribe
against the Czar of Russia, essential vindications
of the moral principle. Was it Heaven or Hell ?
in its simple pathos, The Man that Corrupted Hadley-
burg in its morally salutary irony, present vital
evidence of that same transvaluation of current
moral values which marks the age of Nietzsche and
Ibsen, of Tolstoy and Shaw. In that amusing,
naive biography of her father, little Susy admits that
he could make exceedingly bright jokes and could
be extremely amusing ; but she maintains that he
was more interested in earnest books and earnest
conversation than in humorous ones. She pro
nounced him to be as much of a Pholosopher (sic)
as anything. And she hazards the opinion that he
might have done a great deal in this direction if only
he had studied when he was a boy !

Years ago, Mark Twain wrote a book which he
called An Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to
Heaven. For long he desisted from publishing it
because of his fear that its outspoken frankness

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST 197

would appear irreverent and shock the sensibilities
of the public. While his villa of " Stormfield " was
in course of erection several years ago, he discovered
that half of it was going to cost what he had expected
to pay for the whole house. His heart was set on
having a loggia or sun-parlour ; and when it seemed
that he would have to sacrifice this apple of his eye
through lack of funds, he threw discretion to the winds,
hauled out Captain Stormfield and made the old tar
pay the piper. His fears as to its reception were wholly
unwarranted ; for it was generously enjoyed for its
shrewd and vastly suggestive ideas on religion and
heaven as popularly taught nowadays from the pulpits.
This book is full of a keen and bluff common sense,
cannily expressed in the words of an old sea-captain
whom Mark Twain had known intimately. It is
only another link in the chain of evidence which goes
to prove that Mark Twain had thought long and
deeply upon the problematical nature of a future life.
It is, in essence, a reductio ad absurdum of those
professors of religion who still preach a heaven of
golden streets and pearly gates, of idleness and ever
lasting psalm-singing, of restful and innocuous bliss.
Mark Twain wanted to point out the absurdity of
taking the allegories and the figurative language of
the Bible literally. Of course everybody called for

198 MARK TWAIN

a harp and a halo as soon as they reached heaven.
They were given the harps and halos — indeed nothing
harmless and reasonable was refused them. But
they found these things the merest accessories.
Mark Twain's heaven was just the busiest place
imaginable. There weren't any idle people there
after the first day. The old sea captain pointed out
that singing hymns and waving palm branches through
all eternity was all very pretty when you heard
about it from the pulpit, but that it was a mighty
poor way to put in valuable time. He took no stock
in a heaven of warbling ignoramuses. He found that
Eternal Rest, reduced to hard pan, was not as com
forting as it sounds in the pulpit. Heaven is the
merited reward of service ; and the opportunities
for service were infinite. As he said, you've got to
earn a thing square and honest before you can enjoy
it. To Mark, this was " about the sensiblest heaven "
he had ever heard of. He mourned a little over the
discovery that what a man mostly missed in heaven
was company. But he rejoiced in the information
vouchsafed by his friend the Captain — a valuable
piece of information that leaves him, and all who are
so fortunate as to hear it, the better for the know
ledge — that happiness isn't a thing in itself, but only
a contrast with something that isn't pleasant ! This

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST 199

view of heaven, seen through the temperament of a
humorist and a philosopher, is provocative and
thought- compelling more than it is amusing or
ludicrous. I think it inspired Bernard Shaw's
Aerial Foot-ball which won Collier's thousand dollar
prize — a prize which Mr Shaw hurled back with
indignation and scorn !

Mark Twain was a great humorist — more genial
than grim, more good-humoured than ironic, more
given to imaginative exaggeration than to intel
lectual sophistication, more inclined to pathos than
to melancholy. He was a great story-teller and
fabulist ; and he has enriched the literature of the
world with a gallery of portraits so human in their
likenesses as to rank them with the great figures of
classic comedy and picaresque romance. He was
a remarkable observer and faithful reporter, never
allowing himself, in Ibsen's phrase, to be " frightened
by the venerableness of the institution " ; and his
sublimated journalism reveals a mastery of the
naively comic thoroughly human and democratic.
He is the most eminent product of our American
democracy, and, in profoundly shocking Great
Britain by preferring Connecticut to Camelot, he
exhibited that robustness of outlook, that buoyancy
of spirit, and that faith in the contemporary which

200 MARK TWAIN

stamps America in perennial and inexhaustible
youth. Throughout his long life, he has been a factor
of high ethical influence in our civilization, and the
philosopher and the humanitarian look out through
the twinkling eyes of the humorist.

And yet, after all, Mark Twain's supreme title to
distinction as a great writer inheres in his natural,
if not wholly conscious, mastery in that highest
sphere of thought, embracing religion, philosophy,
morality and even humour, which we call sociology.
When I first advanced this view, it was taken up
on all sides. Here, we were told, was Mark Twain
" from a new angle " ; the essay was reviewed at
length on the continent of Europe ; and the author
of the essay was invited "to explain Mark Twain
to the German public " ! There are still many
people, however, who resent any demonstration
that Mark Twain was anything more than a
mirthful and humorous entertainer. Mr. Bernard
Shaw once remarked to me, in support of the view
here outlined, that he regarded Poe and Mark Twain
as America's greatest achievements in literature,
and that he thought of Mark Twain primarily, not
as humorist, but as sociologist. " Of course," he
added, " Mark Twain is in much the same position
as myself : he has to put matters in such a way as to

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST

make people who would otherwise hang him, believe
he is joking."

Mark Twain once said that whenever he had
diverged from custom and principle to utter a truth,
the rule had been that the hearer hadn't strength
of mind enough to believe it. " Custom is a petri
faction," he asserted; "nothing but dynamite can
dislodge it for a century." Mr. W. D. Howells has
advanced the somewhat fanciful theory that " the
ludicrous incongruity of a slave-holding democracy
nurtured upon the Declaration of Independence, and
the comical spectacle of white labour owning black
labour, had something to do in quickening (in Mark
Twain) the sense of contrast which is the mountain of
humour or is said to be so." However that may be,
Mark Twain was irresistibly driven to the conclusion,
Southern born though he was, that slavery was
unjust, inhuman, and indefensible. The advanced
thinkers in the South had reached this conclusion
long before the beginning of the Civil War, and
many Southern men had actually devised freedom
to their slaves in their wills. The slaves were treated
humanely, their material wants were cared for by
their owners with a care that can only be called
loving, and their spiritual welfare was the frequent
concern in particular of the mistress of the house.

202 MARK TWAIN

In his schoolboy days, Mark Twain had no aversion
to slavery. He wasn't even aware that there was
anything wrong about it. He never heard it con
demned by acquaintances or in the local papers.
And as for the preachers, they taught that God
approved slavery, and cited Biblical passages in
support of that view. If the slaves themselves were
averse to it, at least they kept discreetly silent on
the subject. He seldom saw a slave misused — on
the farm, never. But when he was brought face
to face with Sandy, the little slave forcibly separated
from his family^ itjnade a deep impression upon his
consciousness. It was this deplorable evil of the
system, this unnatural and inhuman forcible separa
tion of the members of the same family, the one
from the other, that convinced him of the injustice
of slavery ; though this vision, as has been pointed
out by Mr. Ho wells, did not come to him " till after
his liberation from neighbourhood in the vaster far
West." Yet it found its wa^ into his books— into
Huckleberry Finn, with its recital of Jim's pathetic
longing to buy back his wife and children; and.
in Pudd'nhead Wilson with its moving picture of
the poor slave's agony when she suddenly realizes
in the way the water is flowing around the snag
that she is being " sold down the river." In

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST 203

Uncle Tom's Cabin, as Professor Phelps has pointed
out, " the red-hot indignation of the author largely
nullified her evident desire to tell the truth. . . .
Mrs. Stowe's astonishing work is not really the
history of slavery ; it is the history of abolition
sentiment. . . . Mark Twain shows us the beautiful
side of slavery — for it had a wonderfully beautiful,
patriarchal side — and he also shows us the horror of
it." Mark Twain has declared that the only way
to write a great novel is to learn the scenes and
people with which the story is concerned, through
years of " unconscious absorption " of the facts
of the life to be portrayed. When his stories were
written, slavery was a thing of the past — he was
competent to judge of the situation impartially,
through direct personal contact throughout his
boyhood with the realities of slavery. His object
was not the object of the reformer, warped with
prejudice and fired by animosity. He saw clearly ;
for his aim was not polemic, but artistic. Hence
it is, I believe, that Mark Twain stands out as,
in essence and in fundamentals, a remarkable
sociologist. Certain passages in his books on
the subject of slavery, as the historian Lecky
has declared, are the truest things that have ever
been expressed on the subject which vexed a con-

204 MARK TWAIN

tinent and plunged a nation in bloody, fratricidal
strife.

Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi
always call up to my mind the most vivid pictures
— pictures that are eternally unforgettable. The
memorable scene in which Colonel Sherburne quells
the mob and his scathing remarks upon lynching ;
the reality and the pathos of the feuds of those
Kentucky families, the Shepherdsons and the
Grangerfords, shooting each other down at sight
in vindication of honour and pride of race ; the-
lordly life of the pilot on the Mississippi, his violent
and unchallenged sway over his subordinates, his
mastery of the river ; the variegated colours of that
lawless, picturesque, semi-barbarous life of the
river — all these sweep by us in a series of panoramic
pictures as Huck's raft swings lazily down the
tawny river, and Horace Bixby guides his boat
through the dangers of the channel. Mark Twain
is primarily a great artist, only unconsciously a
true sociologist. But his power as a sociologist
is no less real that it is unconscious, indeed infinitely
more real and human and verisimilar that it is not
polemical. There is a " sort of contemporaneous
posterity " which has registered its verdict that
Mark Twain was the greatest humorist of the present

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST 205

era. But there is yet to come that greater posterity
of the future which will, I dare say, class Mark Twain
as America's greatest, most human sociologist in
letters. He is the historian, the historian in art,
of a varied and unique phase of civilization on the
American continent that has passed forever. And
it is inconceivable that any future investigator
into the sociological phases of that civilization can
fail to find priceless and unparalleled documents in
the wild yet genial, rudimentary yet sane, boisterous
yet universally human writings of Mark Twain.

Mark Twain's genius of social comprehension and
sociologic interpretation went even deeper than
this. His mastery lay not alone in penetrative re
flection of a bit of sectional life and a vanished phase
of our civilization, not alone in astute criticism of an
" institution " blotted from the American escutcheon
and a collective racial passion that periodically breaks
forth from time to time in mad " carnivals of crime."
The defining quality of the true sociologist, that
quality which gives his profession its power and
validity as an effective instrumentality in the ad
vancement of civilization, is the faculty of penetrating
national and racial disguises, and going directly to
the heart of the human problem. Mark Twain
possessed this faculty in supreme degree. As a

206 MARK TWAIN

literary critic he was banal and futile ; but as a social
and racial critic he was remarkable and profound.
His essay Concerning the Jews is a masterpiece of
impartial interpretation ; his comprehension of
French and German racial traits, as revealed in his
works, is keen and pervasively pertinent ; and his
magnificent analysis of the situation in South Africa,
in the concluding chapters of Following the Equator,
rings clear with the accents of truth and mounts
almost to the dignity of public prophecy. Deeper
far, more comprehensive, and voiced with splendid
courage, are Mark Twain's interpretations of American
democracy and his mirroring of the national ideals.
His " defence " of General Funston is a scorching and
devastating blast, red with the fires of patriotism.
Whatever be one's convictions, one cannot but
respect the profound sincerity of Mark Twain's
berserker-like rage over the attitude of Europe in
China, the barbarities of Russian autocracy, and the
horrors of America's methods in the Philippines,
copied after Weyler's reconcentrado policy in Cuba.
His study of Christian Science, despite its hyperbole,
its gross exaggerations and unfulfilled prophecies, is
the expression of glorified common-sense, a socio
logical study of religious fanaticism comprehensive in
psychological analysis of national and racial traits.

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST 207

In his own works, Mark Twain brought to realiza
tion the dim and inchoate fancies of Whitman ; in his
own person he realized that " divine average " of
common life which is the dream of American democ
racy. The Prince and the Pauper is a beautiful
child's tale, vivid in narrative and rich in human
interest. It is something deeper far than this ; for
the very crucial motive of the story, the successful
substitution of the commoner for the king, transforms
it into a symbolic legend of democracy and the
equality of man. Mark Twain vehemently approved
the French revolution, and frankly expressed his
regret over Napoleon's failure to invade England and
thus destroy the last vestiges of the semi-feudal
paraphernalia of the British, monarchy. Despite its
note of Yankee blatancy, A Yankee at the Court of
King Arthur is a rem? rkable brief for democracy and
the brotherhood of - nan. So eminent a publicist as
Mr. William T. Stead pronounced it, at the time of its
first appearance, one of the most significant books of
our time ; and classed it (with Henry George's Progress
and Poverty and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward)
as the th\rd great book from America to give tre
mendous impetus to the social democratic movement
of the age. Mark Twain abandoned all hope of a
future Kf e ; found more of sorrow than of joy

208 MARK TWAIN

life's balances ; and even, in his latter years, lost faith
in humanity itself. But amid the wreck of faiths and
creeds, he achieved the strange paradox of American
optimism : he never lost faith in democracy, and
fought valiantly to the end in behalf of equality and
the welfare of the average man.

Several years ago, when we were crossing the
Atlantic on the same ship, Mr. Clemens told me that
while he was living in Hartford in the early eighties,,.
I think, he wrote a paper to be read at the fort-
nigh dly club to which he belonged. This club was
composed" Chiefly of men whose deepest interests
were concerned1 with the theological and the religi
ously orthodox. Ume of his friends, to whom he
read this paper in ad\.ance, solemnly warned him
not to read it before the cluJh. For he felt confident
that a philosophical essay, expressing candid doubt
as to the existence of free will, an d declaring without
hesitation that every man was unde.r the immitigable
compulsion of his temperament, his training, and
his environment, would appear unspeakably shock
ing, heretical and blasphemous to tht^ orthodox
members of that club. " I did not read tk^t paper,"
Mr. Clemens said to me, " but I put it away, resolved
to let it stand the corrosive test of time. Ev^ry now
and then, when it occurred to me, I used to take

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST 209

that paper out and read it, to compare its views
with my own later views. From time to time I
added something to it. But I never found, during
that quarter of a century, that my views had altered
in the slightest degree. I had a few copies published
not long ago ; but there is not the slightest evidence
in the book to indicate its authorship." A few
days later he gave me a copy, and when I read that
book, I found these words, among others, in the
prefatory note :

" Every thought in them (these papers) has been
thought (and accepted as unassailable truth) by
millions upon millions of men — and concealed,
kept private. Why did they not speak out ? Be
cause they dreaded (and could not bear) the dis
approval of the people around them. Why have
I not published ? The same reason has restrained
me, I think. I can find no other."

What is Man ? propounds at length, through the
medium of a dialogue between a Young Man and an
Old Man, the doctrine that " Beliefs are acquire
ments ; temperaments are born. Beliefs are subject
to change ; nothing whatever can change tempera
ment." He enunciates the theory, which seems
to me both brilliant and original, that there can be
no such person as a permanent seeker after truth,
o

MARK TWAIN

" When he found the truth he sought no farther ;
but from that day forth, with his soldering iron in
one hand and his bludgeon in the other, he tinkered its
leaks and reasoned with objectors." " All training,"
he avers, " is one form or another of outside influences,
and association is the largest part of it. Aman is
never anything but what his outside influences
have made him. They train him downward or they
train him upward — but they train him; they* are
at work upon him all the time." Once asked by
Rudyard Kipling whether he was ever going to
write another story about Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
replied that he had a notion of writing the sequel
to Tom Sawyer in two parts, in one bringing him
to high honour, and in the other bringing him to
the gallows. When Kipling protested vigorously
against any theory of the sort, because Tom Sawyer
was real, Mark Twain replied with the fatalistic
doctrine of What is Man ? : " Oh, he is real. He's
all the boy that I have known or recollect ; but
that would be a good way of ending the book —
because, when you come to think of it, neither religion,
training, nor education avails anything against the
force of circumstances that drive a man. Suppose
we took the next four and twenty years of Tom
Sawyer's life, and gave a little joggle to the

PHILOSOPHER, MORALIST, SOCIOLOGIST

circumstances that controlled him. He would,
logically and according to the joggle, turn out a
rip or an angel." It was what he called Kismet.
It is one of the tragedies of his life, so sad in many
ways, that in the days when the blows of fate fell
heaviest upon his head, he had lost all faith in the
Christian ideals, all belief in immortality or a personal
God. And yet he avowed that, no matter what
form of religion or theology, atheism or agnosticism,
the individual or the nation embraced, the human
race remained " indestructibly content, happy; — j ^^

thankful, proud." He^jie3D£i^imd^ft-4mge"^-pessi- .-» Ijf
mism in his make-up, his beliefs never tended to
warp his nature, he accepted his fatalism gladly
because he saw in it supreme truth. His ultimate
philosophy of lif e, which he sums up in What is Man ?,
is healthy and right-minded. It is best embodied
hi the lofty injunction : " Diligently train your
ideals upward and still upward towards a summit
where you will find your chiefest pleasure in conduct
which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer
benefits upon your neighbour and the community."
Lassalle once said : " History forgives mistakes
and failures, but not want of conviction." In
Mark Twain, posterity will never be called upon to
forgive any want of conviction.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS, ESSAYS, AND ARTICLES
DEALING WITH MARK TWAIN (SAMUEL LANGHORNE
CLEMENS)

1869 (SEPTEMBER)— 1910 (SEPTEMBER)

1869. Eeviews of The Innocents Abroad. " Nation " (N.Y.),

September 2 ; " Atlantic Monthly," December.

1870. Keviews of The Innocents Abroad. By Bret Harte

in " Overland Monthly," January ; " Saturday
Keview," October 8.

Introduction to The Innocents Abroad (English edition,
J. C. Hotten : London). By E. P. Hingston.

1872. Les Humoristes Amtricaines. Mark Twain. By Th.

Bentzon (Mme. Blanc). " Revue des Deux Mondes,"
July 15.
Mark Twain. " Once a Week," December 14.

1873. Introduction to the Choice Humorous Works of Mark

Twain (J. C. Hotten : London). By " J. C. H."

1874. Review of The Gilded Age. " Old and New," March.
Mark Twain. By G. T. Ferris. " Appleton's Magazine,"

July.

1875. L'Age Dort en Amdrique. Constituting an elaborate

review, with appreciation and lengthy extracts, of
The Gilded Age (London, 1874). By Th. Bentzon
(Mme. Blanc). "Revue des Deux Mondes," March 15.

215

216 MARK TWAIN

1879. Mark Twain at Hartford. In Celebrities at Home, by

Edmund Yates. Reprinted from "The World"
(London). Third Series.

1880. Keview of A Tramp Abroad. " Athenaeum," April 24.

1881. Eeview of The Prince and the Pauper. "Critic,"

December 31.

1882. Mark Twain. " Critic," June 17.

Keview of The Stolen White Elephant. "Nation"
(N.Y.), August 10.

Mark Twain. By W. D. Howells. "Century," Sep
tember.

Mark Twain. In American Humorists, by H. R. Haweis.
(Funk and Wagnalls : New York.)

1883. Reviews of Life on the Mississippi. " Athenaeum,"

June 2 ; by R. Brown in " The Academy," July
28 ; " Congregationalist," August ; " Nation " (N.Y.),
August 30 ; " Atlantic Monthly," September.

1884. Mark Twain and the First of April. " Critic," April 5.
Mark Twain in Bronze. " Critic," October 18.

1885. Mark Twain at " Nook Farm " (Hartford] and Elmira.

By C. H. Clark. " Critic," January 17.
To Mark Twain on his Fiftieth Birthday. Poem by

Oliver Wendell Holmes. " Critic," November 28.
The Boyhood of Mark Twain. " Critic," December 12.

1886. Les Caravanes d'un humoriste. Constituting a critical

sketch of, and long citations from, Life on the
Mississippi ( Jas. R. Osgood and Co. : Boston, 1885).
By Eugene Forgues. " Revue des Deux Mondes,"
February 15.

1887. Mark Twain. In Famous American Authors, by Sarah

K. Bolton. (Thos. Y. Crowell and Co. : New York.)

APPENDIX 217

1888. Mark Twain. By C. H. Clark. In Authors at Home,
edited by J. L. andJT. B. Gilder. (Cassell Publishing
Co. : New York.) Same article in " Critic," January
17, 1885.

1890. Review of A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King

Arthur. In Editor's Study. "Harper's Magazine,"

January.
Sketch of A Yankee in King Arthur's Court. " Review

of Reviews " (London), February.
Review of A Yankee in King Arthur's Court. "Critic,"

February 22.
The Way Mark Twain impressed England. " Critic,"

November 29.
Introduction to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. By

G. Krieger. (G. Freytag : Leipzig.)

1891. Andrew Lang's Tribute to Mark Twain. From " Illustrated

News of the World." " Critic," March 7.
The Art of Mark Twain. From " Illustrated News of
the World." By Andrew Lang. " Critic," July 25.

1892. Mark Twain. His Life and Work. By W. M. Clemens.

(Clemens Publishing Co., San Francisco.)
Chance Recollections of Mark Twain. By M. M. Fairbanks.

" Chautauquan," January.
Mark Twain. Interview by Luke Sharp. " Idler,"

February.
Mark Twain. By J. Stuart. " Literary Opinion,"

July.

1893. Reporting with Mark Twain. By Dan de Quille.

" Calif ornian Illustrated Magazine," July.
S. L. Clemens and his Recent Works. By Frank R.

Stockton. " Forum," August.
Stockton on Mark Twain. " Critic," August 12.
Mark Twain at the Lotos. " Critic," November 18.

218 MARK TWAIN

1894. Mark Twain. In Liter arische Ansichten in Vortrdgen.

By Franz Sintenis. (E. J. Karow's Universitats-

buchhandlung : Dorpat = Fellin.)
Mark Twain. In American Writers of To-day. By

H. C.JVedder. (Silver and Burdett : New York.)
Test Readings of Mark Twain's Hands. " Borderland,"

January.

Mark Twain as a Plagiarist. " Critic," March 31.
Private History of the "Jumping Frog" Story. By

Mark Twain. " North American Eeview," April.
Keview of Tom Sawyer Abroad. " Saturday Review,"

May 19.

1895. Of Mark Twain's Best Story. In Books and Play-Books.

By Brander Matthews. (Osgood, Mcllvaine and Co. :

London.)
Mark Twain's Character by Palmistry and Otherwise.

" Borderland," January.
Samuel L. Clemens on Paul Bourget's " Outre Mer."

Reply to Mark Twain. By Max O'Rell (Paul Blouet).

" North American Review," March.
Review of Pudd'nhead Wilson. " Critic," May 11.
Mark Twain as a Critic. By D. F. Hannigan. " Free

Review," October.

1896. Mark Twain as an Historical Novelist. By W. P. Trent.

" Bookman " (N.Y.), May.
Review of Mark Twain's humoristische Schriften. " Beilage

z. Allgemeinen Zeitung," May 6.
Mark Twain. By Joseph H. Twichell. " Harper's

Magazine," May.

Portraits of Mark Twain. " McClure's Magazine," June.
Mark Twain Up-to-date. " Idler," July.

1897. Mark Twain. In Warner's Library of the World's Best

Literature, vol. vii. (R. S. Peale and J. A. Hill :
New York.)

APPENDIX 219

Mark Twain and his Work. By Brander Matthews.

" Book-Buyer," January.
\ Mark Twain as an Interpreter of American Character.

By Charles M. Thompson. "Atlantic Monthly,"

April.

Mark Twain, Benefactor. " Academy," June 26.
Mark Twain. A Character Sketch. By W. T. Stead.

" Keview of Eeviews " (London), August. Same article :

" Keview of Reviews" (Australasian edition), September.
^Mark Twain's Place in Literature. By David Masters.

" Chautauquan," September.
Mark Twain. In My Contemporaries in Fiction. By

D. C. Murray. " Canadian Magazine," October.
Mark Twain in Germany. " Critic," November 20.
Die Humoristen. In Geschichte der nordamerikanischen

Litteratur. By E. Engel. (J. Baedeker : Leipzig.)
Review of Mark Twain's humoristische Schriften. " Illus-

trirte Zeitung," Nr. 2843,

1898. Mark Twain. By Robert Barr. " McClure's Magazine,"

January ; " Idler," February (same article).
"The Book of the Month" More Tramps Abroad.

" Review of Reviews " (London), January.
Review of More Tramps Abroad. " Lettres Anglaises "

in " Mercure de France," February.
Mark Twain as Prospective Classic. By Theodore de

Laguna. " Overland Monthly," April.
The Real Mark Twain. By Carlyle Smith. " Pall Mall

Magazine," September.
Mark Twain in California. By Noah Brooks. " Century,"

November.
Psychophysik des Humors. By K. L. Schleich.

" Zukunft," vol. xxv., ss. 374-393.
Mark Twain. By " S. T." " Monatsblatter fur deutsche

Litteratur," third year, ss. 33-35.

220 MARK TWAIN

1899. Mark Twain. A Biographical Criticism. By Brander

Matthews. In vol. i., collected edition of Mark

Twain's works (Harper and Bros. : New York. Chatto

and Windus: London). Keprinted in Inquiries and

Opinions, by B. Matthews. (Chas. Scribner's Sons:

New York, 1907.)
Mark Twain's Pets. By Edwin Wildman. " St Nicholas,"

January.
Mark Twain's First Book. By Luther F. Livingstone.

" Bookman " (N.Y.), February.
Mark Twain in Deutschland. By Carl von Thaler. " Die

Gegenwart," June 17.
^American Humour : Mark Twain. By Anna E. Keeling.

" London Quarterly Review," July.
Mark Twain. By Samuel E. Moffett. " McClure's

Magazine," October. Also published in The $30,000

Bequest and Other Stories, by Mark Twain.
Eeply to Mark Twain on the Jews. By M. S. Levy.

" Overland Monthly," October.

My Dlbut as a Literary Person. By Mark Twain.
\ " Century," November.
Review of Mark Twain's Complete Works (Chatto and

Windus). " Lettres Anglaises " in " Mercure de

France," December.
Familiar Haunts of Mark Twain. By E. D. Fiedler.

" Harper's Weekly," December 16.
An Interview with Mark Twain. In From Sea to Sea,

by Rudyard Kipling. (Doubleday and McClure Co. :
New York.)
Introduction to Mark Twain's humoristische Schriften.

(Lutz: Stuttgart.)

1900. Mark Twain. In Eccentricities of Genius. By J. B.
Pond. (Chatto and Windus : London.)

APPENDIX

Introduction to Contes Choisis de Mark Twain. By

Gabriel de Lautrec. (Mercure de France : Paris.)
One of Mark Twain's Heroes (Captain Josiah Mitchell).

By B. F. Hawley. " Century," May.
My Favorite Novelist and His Best Book. By Sir W.

Besant. " Munsey's Magazine," June.
Mark Twain on the Lecture Platform. By W. M. Clemens.

" Ainslee's Magazine," August.
Mark Twain. By J. E. Hodder- Williams. " Bookman "

(London), September.
Review of Contes Choisis de Mark Twain. (Translated by

Gabriel de Lautrec.) " Mercure de France," September.
God Speed Mark Twain. By P. Bigelow. " Inde
pendent," October 25.
Reviews of The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg.

"Harper's Weekly," August 25; "Athenaeum,"

September 29 ; " Critic" (William Archer), November ;

" Blackwood's Magazine," November ; same article

" Living Age," December 15.
Mark Twain, American Citizen. " Nation " (N.Y.),

November 29.
Twain's Trip around the World. " Current Literature,"

December.
Surprise Party to Twain. By WT. D. Howells. " Harper's

Weekly," December 15.
Twain and his Characters. " Harper's Weekly,"

December 15.
Mark Twain. Being a review of his Ausgewahlte humorist.

Schriften (Lutz : Stuttgart). By " D." " Alte und

Neue Welt," vol. xxxiv., s. 700.

1901. Mark Twain as an Educator. By C. J. France. " Educa
tion," January.

Mark Twain. A Biographical Sketch. " Review of
Reviews " (N.Y.), January.

MARK TWAIN

.. .Jllark Twain a Humorist only. "Bookman" (N.Y.),

January.
Mark Twain : an Inquiry. By W. D. Howells. " North

American Review," February. Reproduced in same

magazine, June, 1910.
Mark Twain more than Humorist. By R. E. Phillips

" Book-Buyer," April.
Mark Twain's Lecturing Experience. " Book-Buyer,"

April.
Twain as an Inventor. By F. E. Leupp. "Harper's

Weekly," September 7.
A Retrospect of American Humor. By W. P. Trent.

" Century," November.
Mark Twain. A Biographical Sketch. By W. Ramsay.

" Great Thoughts," December.
Reviews of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In gekiirzter

Fassg. (W. G. Kriiger, Leipzig : Freytag, 1900) :—

(a) by H. Heim. " Mitteilungen a. d. gesammten
Gebiete d. engl. Sprache u. Litteratur." Beibl.
z. " Anglia," ss. 28-31.

(b) by J. Ellinger. Same journal, s. 148.

(c) by Ph. Wagner. " Englische Studien," s. 164.
Mark Twain. Biographical Introduction to A Tramp

Abroad (selected chapters for use in the schools),
edited by Dr. Max Mann. (Leipzig : Freytag, 1901.)

1902. Mark Twain and the "chat noir" By R Phillips

" Book-Buyer," June.
A Day with Mark Twain. By W. B. Northrop. " Cassell's

Magazine," July.
Twain unveils a Tablet to Eugene Field. "Harper's

Weekly," July 15.
The Boyhood Home of Mark Twain. By Henry M.

Wharton. " Century," September.
Obituaries of Twain. " Harper's Weekly," November 29.

APPENDIX

W . D. Howells* Appreciation of Mark Twain. " Con
necticut Magazine," December.

In Honor of Mark Twain ; Poems. " Harper's Weekly,"
December 13.

Mark Twain and Christian Science. " Harper's Weekly,"
December 27.

Samuel L. Clemens and the First Nevada Legislature.
By M. L. Luther. " Land of Sunshine," vol. xv.,
p. 144.

Review of M. Twain : A Tramp Abroad, h. v. M. Mann
(Leipzig: Freytag, 1901). By J. Ellinger. " Mit-
teilungen a. d. gesamten Gebiete d. engl. Sprache
u. Litteratur," Beibl. z. " Anglia/' s. 149.

1903. Will Christian Science Rule the World? " Review of

Reviews " (N.Y.), January.

Fiftieth Birthday of Mark Twain. " Critic," January.
Mark Twain and Christian Science. " Harper's Weekly,"

January 24.

Caricature of Mark Twain. " Bookman " (N.Y.), July.
Portrait of Mark Twain, from the miniature of Ugo Catani.

" Studio," September 15.
Mark Twain u. d. amerikanische Humor. By B. Diederich.

" Der Tiirmer " (Stuttgart), July, ss. 434-445.
Altertumliche Sprache in d. Roman : The Prince and

the Pauper. By J. Ellinger. " Beitrage zur neuer.

Philologie J. Schipper z. 19. Juli 1902," ss. 88-107.
Review of A Tramp Abroad, h. v. M. Mann (Leipzig :

Freytag, 1900). By Wilhelm Swoboda. "Die

neueren Sprachen," July, ss. 223-225.

1904. Mark Twain. By T. M. Parrott. " Booklover's

Magazine," February.

Interview with Mark Twain. By J. Mc Arthur. " Harper's
Weekly," May 14.

MARK TWAIN

Marie Twain from an Italian Point of View. By Raffaele
Simboli. " Critic," June.

Extracts from Adam's Diary. " Spectator," June 11.
A Glance at Twain's Spoken and Written Art. By

K. W. Gilder. " Outlook," December 3.
" Mark Twain" Samuel L. Clemens. By W. L. Alden.

" English Illustrated Magazine," November.
Mark Twain als Mensch u. Humorist. By A. Wurm.

" Alte und neue Welt" (Einsiedeln), s. 718.

1905. Mark Twain's Autobiography, 1872. "Connecticut

Magazine," April.
Mark Twain at Seventy. " Outlook," December 2 ;

" Nation," December 14.
Seventieth Birthday Dinner to Mark Twain. " Harper's

Weekly," December 23.
Mark Twain u. d. amerik. Humor. " Beilage zur

Allgemeinen Zeitung " (Miinchen). Nr. 77.
Mark Twain (zu seinem siebzigsten Geburtstage], with

portrait. By Ludwig Salomon. " Illustrirte Zeitung."

(Leipzig), November 30.
Mark Twain. By B. Diederich. " Tagl. Eundschau "

(Leipzig), Nr. 280.
Mark Twain (zum siebzigsten Geburtstag}. By L. Kellner.

"Neue Freie Presse " (Literaturblatt), December 3,

ss. 31-32.
Review of A Tramp Abroad, h. v. M. Mann (Leipzig :

Freytag, 1901). By Huendgren. "Gymnasium"

(Paderborn), s. 49.

1906. The Story of Mark Twain's Debts. By Frederick A.

King. " Bookman " (N.Y.), January. Virtually
same article in same magazine, June, 1910.

APPENDIX

When Mark Twain Lectured. By W. H. Merrill.

" Harper's Weekly," February 10.
Mark Twain. Neues v. Alt. By B. Diederich. "Der

Tiirmer," May, ss. 173-178,
Mark Twain's Life of Samuel L. Clemens. " Current

Literature," October.
Chapters from My Autobiography. By Mark Twain.

"North American Eeview." Begun September 7,

1906, and ended December, 1907.

1907. Samuel L. Clemens. By H. M. Bland. " Overland

Monthly," January.
Samuel L. Clemens. By S. ' Gould. " Broadway

Magazine," February.
Samuel L. Clemens. By Andrew Lang. " Albany

Eeview," April.
Mark Twain, Mrs Eddy and Christian Science. By

E. A. Kimball. " Cosmopolitan," May.
'Mark Twain. By W. L. Phelps. " North American

Review," July 5. Same article in Essays on Modern

Novelists, by W. L. Phelps. (The Macmillan Co.,

1910.)
Samuel L. Clemens. " Spectator," May 25 ; same article,

" Living Age," July 6.
S. L. Clemens in England. By Sydney Brooks. " Harper's

Weekly," July 20.
England's Ovation to Mark Twain. By Sydney Brooks.

" Harper's Weekly," July 27.
Mark Twain, Doctor of Letters. By Samuel E. Moffett.

" Eeview of Reviews " (N.Y.), August.
Mark Twain, the Humorist. By Hamilton W. Mabie.

" Outlook," November 23.
Review of The $30,000 Bequest and other Stories. By

E. Teichmann. " Neue Philologische Rundschau,"

s. 593.

MARK TWAIN

The Savage Club. By Aaron Watson. T. Fisher Unwin,
London. Chapters : Artemus Ward and Mark Twain,
and Mark Twain's Own Account', pp. 119-135.
IQOS.^Mark Twain. In The New American Type, and other
Essays. By Henry D. Sedgwick. (Houghton,
Mifflin and Co. : Boston.)

Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. By Ferris Greenslet.
(Hough ton, Mifflin and Co. : Boston.)

A Senator of the Sixties. By W. M. Stewart. (Neale
Publishing Co. : Richmond.) Compare also " Saturday
Evening Post," February 15.

American Literature. By Charles Whibley. " Black-
wood's Magazine," March.

Mark Twain's New Home at Redding, Conn. By A. B.

Paine. " Harper's Weekly," July 4.
^American Humor. By Brander Matthews. " Saturday
Evening Post," November 21.

Life of Bret Harte. By T. Edgar Pemberton. (C. Arthur
Pearson : London.)

1909. Sixty Years in the Wilderness. By Sir H. Lucy. Chapter

(pp. 220-229) on Mark Twain. (E. P. Button and Co. :

New York.)
Mark Twain's House at Redding, Conn. " American

Architect and Building News " (N.Y.), February 10.
"'Stormfield" Mark Twain's New Country Home. By

A. R. Dugmore. " Country Life in America," April.
Mark Twain. His Unique Position in the Republic of

Letters. By Archibald Henderson. "Harper's

Magazine," May.
Mark Twain at Stormfield. By A. B. Paine. " Harper's

Magazine," May.
The Real Mark Twain. The Man and his Work. By

Archibald Henderson. " Charlotte Observer,"

Sunday, May 16.

APPENDIX

Is Mark Twain Dead ? Comment. " Bookman " (N.Y.),

June.
A Shakespeare Puzzle. Being an analysis of Is Shakespeare

Dead ? Editor's Study. " Harper's Magazine," July.
Marie Twain. By Jacques Lux. " L'lndependence

Beige," July 16.
Mark Twain from a New Angle. " Current Literature,"

August.
Is Mark Twain Dead? By E. H. Angert. "North

American Review," September.
Mark Twain — wie er ist. Eine Skizze nock dem Leben.

By Archibald Henderson. " Deutsche Revue,"

November.
Mark Twain Library Benefit. " Putnam's Magazine,"

December.
Mark Twain on Christian Science. By M. Fischer. " Die

neueren Sprachen," ss. 206-228.

1910. Mark Twain Number of "The Book News Monthly"

(Philadelphia), April, containing the following papers : —

Mark Twain. Personal Impressions. By Henry M.

Alden.

Mark Twain the Humorist. By Clarence H. Gaines.
S. L. Clemens. " New York Observer," April 28.
Mark Twain and His Works. " Independent," April 28.
Mark Twain. By G. K. Chesterton. " T. P.'s Weekly,"

April 29.

Mark Twain as an Author. " Outlook " (N.Y.), April 30'.
Mark Twain. A Biographical Summary. By A. B.

Paine. " Harper's Weekly," April 30.
One of Mark Twain's " Innocents Abroad." " New
York Times," May 1.

228 MARK TWAIN

Notes on Mark Twain. By W. L. Phelps. "Independent,"
May 5.

Twainiana. Compiled by A. M. Stoddart. " Inde
pendent," May 5.

Mark Twain, Intime. " Le Figaro " (Paris), May 7.
The Last Day at Stormfield. Poem by Bliss Carman.

" Collier's Weekly," May 7.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Poem by W. D. Nesbit.

"Harper's Weekly," May 7.
To Mark Twain. Poem by S. F. Murray. "Harper's

Weekly," May 7.
Mark Twain's Religious Book. Being a review of What

is Man ? " Literary Digest," May 7.
Mark Twain. By S. P. Sherman. " Nation," May 12.
Painting the Portrait of Mark Twain. By S. J. Woolf,

" CoUier's Weekly," May 14.
Mark Twain. Poem by J. W. Thompson. "Harper's

Weekly," May 14.

Mark Twain Number of the " Bookman " (N.Y.), June,
containing the following papers : —
Mark Twain — An Appreciation. By Henry M. Alden.
Mark Twain in San Francisco. By Bailey Millard.
Best Sellers of Yesterday. " The Innocents Abroad."

By Arthur B. Maurice.

Mark Twain in Clubland. By William H. Rideing.
Mark Twain a Century Hence. By H. T. Peck.
The Story of Mark Twain's Debts. By Frederick A.

King.

Mark Twain Number of the " Bookman " (London), June,
containing the following papers : —
The Humor of Mark Twain. By Barry Pain.
Mark Twain, the Man and the Jester. By Walter
Jerrold.

APPENDIX 229

Personal Recollections and Opinions of Mark Twain.
By Jerome K. Jerome, E. V. Lucas, Walter
Emanuel, J. J. Bell, Leonard Henslowe, Arnold
Bennett, Owen Seaman, W. Pett Eidge, and
F. Anstey.
Mark Twain's Pessimistic Philosophy. " Current

Literature," June.
Mark Twain as a Serious Force in Literature. " Current

Literature," June.
Mark Twain and the Old Time Subscription Book. By

G. Ade. " Eeview of Eeviews " (N.Y.), June.
Mark Twain, Artist. By W. L. Phelps. "Eeview

of Eeviews " (N.Y.), June.
Mark Twain as a Neighbor. By D. Beard. " Eeview

of Eeviews " (N.Y.), June.
England and Mark Twain. By " Britannicus." " North

American Eeview," June.

Tributes to Mark Twain. By Andrew Carnegie, A. B.
Paine, Booker T. Washington, Booth Tarkington,
Samuel Gompers, Wilbur D. Nesbit, George Ade,
Hamlin Garland, John Kendrick Bangs, Brander
Matthews. " North American Eeview/' June.
A Great Career. " Chautauqua Magazine/' June.
Serious Humorists. " Nation " (N.Y.), June 30.
Mark Twain as an Orator. By " Charles Vale."

" Forum," July.

A Great Individual. " American Monthly/' July.
Mark Twain : an intimate Memory. By Henry Watterson.

"American Magazine/' July.
Mark Twain: a Poem. By Caroline Stern. "Harper's

Weekly/' July 2.

My Memories of Mark Twain. By W. D. Howells.
" Harper's Magazine," July, August, and September.

230 MARK TWAIN

My Mark Twain. By W. D. Howells. Harper & Bros. :

New York and London.
*

NOTE.— This bibliography of more than two hundred and
thirty titles, although it has been compiled with care and after
considerable research, is of necessity incomplete. There remain
numerous articles, essays, and " interviews," scattered about, in
newspapers and magazines, all over the world. These articles
are not indexed and consequently are difficult to trace ; yet, in
many cases, they contain valuable biographical data for the life
of Mark Twain. The author of the present work will sincerely
appreciate any aid given him in the effort to perfect the present
bibliography, and will gratefully acknowledge all articles or
titles sent to him through his publishers, American or English.
All who admire and love the works of Mark Twain may
show their appreciation by adding their mite to the present
bibliography.

* The International Fame of Mark Twain. By Archibald
Henderson. " North American Review/' December.

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